Problems with DFI NF4 and Sata hard drive

[daishi5]

My roommate told me he had problems with his SATA drive, and he found out he had to disable the primary IDE channel to get it fixed. He also said that from what he read it almost always has to be done. Every time I reboot my computer I lose my ntldr file, and have to fix the MBR. It is also reporting the drive as being 130 Gigs when it is 250, it is a seagate drive. I have reloaded windows 3 times. I have also gotten all the drivers loaded, (requires fixing the MBR every reboot)

Anyone else know of this problem? Also does anyone know how to disable the primary IDE on the DFI NF4 SLI board I want to try this and see if it works.

 

[flexy]

do you (or your rm) have another drive (IDE ?) plugged in there ? If yes...this might be the problem...and why disabling the IDE channel would help. I think the PC gets confused because the otehr IDE HD might still be set active in the MBR.

I had troubles too installing...solved it by removing my old (2nd IDE HD w/ an old XP installation)...plugged JUST the SATA drive in and then installed windows. Afterwards you can plug in the old HD and, always good, use a tool like Partitionmagic to make the old HD "inactive" etc.

Otherwise...you shouldnt need any drivers to get a SATA drive to work with this board..i didnt need any either.

 

[daishi5]

Thank you, that worked and system is now stable. However I have another problem. Drive shows up as 130 gigs to operating system, and it does not show any upartitioned space. It should be 250gigs, and thats what the label shows as well. It also showed both this 250G drive as 130, and my OLD 250G drive as 130 during windows setup, and I know my old drive works fine in my old system. Bios seems to detect the drive fine. I am not sure if I should RMA this since whatever caused this to be seen as 130 gigs was also causing the same problem with the old drive, which has nothing wrong with it. I have done a full format using the windows setup, but still same size. Does anyone have ideas what may be causing this?

 

[daishi5]

Never mind, the space showed back up. (Apparently running PATA and SATA hard drives really is screwy.)