Hello everyone, been having some serious upgrade woes, was hoping i might be able to get some resolution here before I lose my mind. I wanted to get a kick ass SLI rig going and instead, lost about 5 years off my life to stress.
After putting together a system which ultimately had a defective DFI motherboard I believe which was running way too hot and was terribly unstable, I am now at the point below with a new motherboard from Gigabyte. Below is the email I sent to Gigabyte, if anyone can have any insight into this problem, it would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanx in advance!
I recently received this motherboard to replace a defective DFI Nforce 4 SLI motherboard, installed it and everything seems to working fine except for a few issues concerning the SATA controllers. When i connect my 2 Maxtor 300gb drives to the board, they do not work properly or do not work at all, however the WD drives work fine. When i originally installed the board, i entered the Nvidia Raid config program, set up the 2 WD as one stripe and the 2 Nvidia drives as a second stripe. After having to reboot while installing windows, the Nvidia raid bios hung while detecting arrays for a few min and when it finally did load, it said there was an error on the Maxtor stripe. I rebooted again, still getting the error, and entered the Nvidia raid bios manager to find that only one drive was there. After trying a few things like swaping cables, running the drives in single drive mode, and swapping the arrays to different ports, it was still erroring out, so i decided to unplug the drives until i got windows installed and running. After I installed windows and got it updated and running fine on the WD stripe, I decided to try to add the maxtor stripe. Again it errored out and let it start loading windows. At this point, i could not boot into windows at all, even in safe mode. Decided that for whatever reason the OS was nuked, so i figured i would try to run the 2 maxtors off the Silicon Image controller. At this point I had only seen the Silicon Image BIOS screen once the first time i booted the computer up, but i figured it was because i had nothing connected to it, even though it is enabled in the BIOS. After connecting the Maxtor drive to the SI controller, I still do not get the SI BIOS screen (the one that says hit F4 to enter setup etc.), however the SI software in windows sees the 2 drives, but i cannot access them. Right now all I have are the WD raptors striped on the Nvidia controller. I believe the maxtor drives are fine because they worked on the DFI board on the same chipset as this one, and they also worked fine on my gigabyte P4 board I had before. Also I get an occaional error in windows when it boots saying the RAID services encountered an error and must be shut down. I would really like to figure this out as this has been a VERY rocky upgrade so far and just want it to work properly. The thought of another piece of defective equipment makes me sick. I just need to know why these drives are not working and why i am no longer seeing the Silicon Image bios screen anymore at bootup even when it is enabled in BIOS.
As far as the MB revision, I am not by the motherboard right now and cant check it, but if this is a vital piece of information, please let me know and i will get that to you asap
After putting together a system which ultimately had a defective DFI motherboard I believe which was running way too hot and was terribly unstable, I am now at the point below with a new motherboard from Gigabyte. Below is the email I sent to Gigabyte, if anyone can have any insight into this problem, it would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanx in advance!
I recently received this motherboard to replace a defective DFI Nforce 4 SLI motherboard, installed it and everything seems to working fine except for a few issues concerning the SATA controllers. When i connect my 2 Maxtor 300gb drives to the board, they do not work properly or do not work at all, however the WD drives work fine. When i originally installed the board, i entered the Nvidia Raid config program, set up the 2 WD as one stripe and the 2 Nvidia drives as a second stripe. After having to reboot while installing windows, the Nvidia raid bios hung while detecting arrays for a few min and when it finally did load, it said there was an error on the Maxtor stripe. I rebooted again, still getting the error, and entered the Nvidia raid bios manager to find that only one drive was there. After trying a few things like swaping cables, running the drives in single drive mode, and swapping the arrays to different ports, it was still erroring out, so i decided to unplug the drives until i got windows installed and running. After I installed windows and got it updated and running fine on the WD stripe, I decided to try to add the maxtor stripe. Again it errored out and let it start loading windows. At this point, i could not boot into windows at all, even in safe mode. Decided that for whatever reason the OS was nuked, so i figured i would try to run the 2 maxtors off the Silicon Image controller. At this point I had only seen the Silicon Image BIOS screen once the first time i booted the computer up, but i figured it was because i had nothing connected to it, even though it is enabled in the BIOS. After connecting the Maxtor drive to the SI controller, I still do not get the SI BIOS screen (the one that says hit F4 to enter setup etc.), however the SI software in windows sees the 2 drives, but i cannot access them. Right now all I have are the WD raptors striped on the Nvidia controller. I believe the maxtor drives are fine because they worked on the DFI board on the same chipset as this one, and they also worked fine on my gigabyte P4 board I had before. Also I get an occaional error in windows when it boots saying the RAID services encountered an error and must be shut down. I would really like to figure this out as this has been a VERY rocky upgrade so far and just want it to work properly. The thought of another piece of defective equipment makes me sick. I just need to know why these drives are not working and why i am no longer seeing the Silicon Image bios screen anymore at bootup even when it is enabled in BIOS.
As far as the MB revision, I am not by the motherboard right now and cant check it, but if this is a vital piece of information, please let me know and i will get that to you asap
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