Problems booting with a sata drive connected

[instant]

My problem is the following:

When one of my many SATA drives is connected during bootup, the computer will just stop at the HD detection and not progress any further.

When this hard-drive is hotplugged while Windows XP is booted, it works ok, until I reboot.


Computer specs:
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard, Most Recent BIOS (Beta)
2GB OCZ (4 x 512MB) PC3200 EL Rev 2.0

Hard Drives and their connection:

NVIdia Nforce4 Serial ATa Controller:
HDS724040KLSA80
WDC WD740GD-00FLA2

Nvidia Nforce4 Serial ATA Controller
WDC WD2500PD-07FZB0

Silicon Image SIL 3114 SATALink Controller
ST340062 OAS SCSI DIsk Device
WDC WD15 00ADFD-00NLR SCIS Disk Device
WDC WD50 00KS-00MNB0 SCSI Disk Device

Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0
Plextor DVDR PX-708A



I have attempted to connect the 150GB Raptor drive on both
the SIlicon Image and the Nvidia SATA controlers without result changes.
(The Raptor is the WDC WD15 00ADFD-00NLR1)

The power supply is a OCZ PowerStream 850W


Anyone got any experiences with something similar, could it be that during bootup the hard drive can not get enough power, or that the SATA Cable is somehow broken which causes it to fail during bootup?

I had a similar problem with another hard-drive that I am not using currently,
so it is not related to the hard drive.

Any ideas would be welcome

 

[instant]

Added information:

- Have attempted to use another SATa Cable and the results are the same.
- If I disconnect 1 of the SATA drives, the computer successfully posts and detects the remaining hard drives.
This seems to indicate that the computer is unable to POST with 6 SATA Drives and 2 IDE attached, WTF?

 

[mechBgon]

So the WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0 is the boot drive, is that correct?

1) is it on a data cable by itself

2) if the answer to #1 is "yes," then make sure you've removed the jumper cap from its jumper pins and just leave it off. That sets it to the special Single Master setting that WD PATA drives tend to like.

 

[instant]

The solution was to downgrade from BIOS 1302 Beta to 1009 Official.
According to vip.asus.com forums one could also use the 1303 Alpha bios, but I opted for a rollback.

What was funny was that any ASUS Update utility after v6.6 would NOT allow me to downgrade from 1302 to 1009.
Also, the AWDFlash 1.17 DOS utility which I had a lot of hassle to get running, due to no floppy, (HP USB Flash Formatter to the rescue, and a MSDOS 7.0 BOOT DISK solved that, in 32-bit windows since it does not work in 64bit) did not let me use the older bios either, despite the ASUS Updater telling me to use it.

... So, now all is working.

Thanks for the suggestions anyway

Hopefully someone else can find this thread if they run into the same problems... found some information on a blog about it as well, but it was hard.

Keywords:
asus a8n-sli premium bios downgrade
asus a8n-sli premium hard drive failure on boot with sli and ide drives connected

 

[instant]

Still not working properly since i get CRC Errors in Windows with the added SATA drive...
Maybe the cable is borked.

System seems to bootup a LOT faster when no IDE drives attached though, so I think i'm gonna scrap
the current IDE drive I am using and go for pure SATA.

The fun thing is that, for some reason, my Plextor drive stopped reading CD's after I burned a CD on 10.5X when it was only 'registered' for 10X....
DVDs it can still read, so I guess I have to make a Windows XP DVD to use as a installation media.


Argh...

 

[instant]

Well.. the computer is now dead

did some attempts with various bioses, 1303, 1302, 1009, decided to flash it back to 1009 from 1303 and the flasher stopped after 20%....

Bye Bye Asus.