Help for SATA 150 ! Any hardware guru pleeese Help

[buddhika]

First of all this is a bit old P4 machine, i'm trying to give maximum details as it will help you to understand the situation:

P4 prescott 2.4ghz
Asus P4 V8x-x mobo (only supports sata150) (VIA VT8237 chipset)
768MB Ram
Asus Radeon 9800xt

Maxtor 80 GB IDE (works fine)
Maxtor 250GB SATA 300 (doesnt work - even @ 150, forced by jumper)

I bought a new 250GB Maxtor diamondMax21 (sata 150/300)

when i connected it to my machine with the jumper set to limit it to 1.5GB/s Bios DETECTs it. (without the jumper it wont detect)

Then I tried to install WinXP to this(only connecting sata disk), had to use nLite and create a slipstream disk because VT8237 sata controller dont get detected with normal xp. I didnt have any floppy/cd that contained the driver so had to get driver files from Via Hyperion setup)

Anyway when i do that it detects the hard and i tried to make a partition on it. partion is created. But when it tries to format the partion it says "windows cannot format the partition", setup fails.

Then i tried installing Vista and Ubuntu, both detects SATA drive and displays its model and capacity correctly. They also can creates a partion but cannot format the partion. I tried Acronis Disk director its the same thing cannot format.

I want to know does it has something to do with my mobo doesnt supporting sata 3GB/s or is the hard disk it self is corrupted ??

The thing is at the moment i dont have any other machine to try this Hard disk in. So your help here would be very valuble for me.

Thanks.

 

[dbcooper1]

Do you have an external USB box you could put it in temporarily?

 

[buddhika]

Another strange thing happened, i tried it on a eSATA card of a friends machine, it worked ok. i made a partition and copied few files.
Then i connected it back to my pc and in windows it showed the new partition and the files. The files were working and i could copy them to my IDE hard. But when I tried to copy files from Ide hard to SATA copying failed !

So it seems a prob with my controller maybe? is there any solution for that?

Originally posted by: dbcooper1
Do you have an external USB box you could put it in temporarily?

Nope, bt if i use it through usb/pci card sata controller would it still have bootable capability ?
Because i want it to use as the main (and probably only ) hard disk of my pc.

 

[dbcooper1]

Yes it would; most current BIOSs have bootable device as an option. It sounds like somehow the drive is read only; is that an option anywhere in your BIOS? It has to be something there or a jumper on the controller?

 

[buddhika]

No i couldnt find any such setting. and its strange if there is such setting to make it read only no?

By searching more in the net i found via vt8237 has problems with SATA II drivers running at 150 speeds.

So anyway I might have these options with this HD, what do you think best for me ? ( I would be using this drive as probably my one & only HD, so it should be fast, bootable, reliable, sit within the casing without additional power. Also my mobo only got PCI slots, so NO PCIexpress. Also i wouldnt have much money to spend on this 🙁 )

1.Changing this SATA drive to a IDE one (will there be much speed differ ? i might get a new pc sys so in future i would be able to use SATA II)

2.Using a SATA-USB or SATA - PCI card

Thanks for any help and any idea is highly regarded.

 

[buddhika]

I tried a SATA->usb2.0 convertor. It identified as a hard @ bios but strange thing was windows setup said it's partitions cannot be used to install windows. But it works perfectly as just a mass storage within Windows(as a normal hard disk, without OS installed to itself)

So i'm thinking to find a SATA->IDE convertor. But problem is will it too have the problem of not been able to install/boot windows xp by it self ??? If so it too will be useless to me 🙁

 

[dbcooper1]

Go with the SATA to IDE converter; there's no performance difference and it will be seen as an internal drive and you should be fine.