Question on an old GA-7N400 Pro motherboard

[TheInternal]

Hey all,

I recently acquired a Giga-byte GA-7N400 Pro nforce 2 (socket A) based motherboard running BIOS revision F8. After putting in an hour or two on the forums trying to find old postings that might answer my problem, I've not had a lot of luck finding a solution.

I've gotten the system to post fine after reseating the 2 x 512 MB of matched pair RAM and discovering I had to flip a little switch by the North Bridge to allow the chipset to run my Athlon XP 3000+ (barton) at it's default 333 FSB speed.

However, I can't get the board to properly recognize any of the SATA drives. I'm trying to install a SATA optical drive, the main hard drive (Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB) on SATA, and one PATA optical drive. At best, I can get a "no NTDLR found" error when I try to run the windows install disk on the SATA optical drive, or a different error if I try to run Ubuntu. I've tried two different optical drives, two different cables, both SATA ports, and a variety of settings in the BIOS (I've tried disabling the raid via BIOS, which seems to totally make the SATA drives invisible, I've set the boot order to SCSI, then where I chose between SCSI / SATA, I set it to SATA).

If I try to install windows xp from an IDE CD-ROM, it can't find the SATA hard drive (Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB), and I can load the Ubuntu trial (running from CD).

Any suggestions from folks familiar with the board would be GREATLY appreciated. Is there some magic setting in the BIOS I'm overlooking? Will I have to find a floppy drive and update the BIOS to magically solve my issues?

 

[Dahak]

What you will have to do is create a F6 floppy disk that contain the sata drivers for that motherboard. When you start the xp install(from the pata ide drive) you have to hit f6 while its loading when prompt to install the sata drivers and once that is done then it will see the sata hard drive to install to

Plus you will need an xp install disk with at least service pack 1 on it as well

Direct Link for the sata driver. Have to download the one called Preinstall Driver Press f6 to install

 

[TheInternal]

but that doesn't address the fact that I can't even LOAD an OS or the installer from a SATA drive. Is it just a major design flaw that you can't load anything from the SATA ports? I know of the F6 thing and the preinstaller and had already downloaded the files yesterday. I just wasn't feeling optimistic that it would solve the issue, considering I can't even load the installer from the SATA optical drive (which would suggest an issue with the BIOS or raid controller).

 

[ModestGamer]

In the BIOS does the SATA support IDE mode emulation ?

 

[nenforcer]

You have to remember that motherboard does not support SATA natively and neither does Windows XP (original release).

It uses a third party SATA controller and like the other poster said needs Windows XP SP1 or later during install to recognize a SATA drive, whether optical or mechanical.

 

[TheInternal]

thanks for that point, nenforcer. I remember early SATA implementation being spotty/pain the ass. I don't believe it's emulating IDE mode, Modest. I guess I have to resort to getting out a dirty, dirty, floppy disk and seeing if that works. however, considering there's an OS on the hard drive and it can't load that from the BIOS, I remain pessimistic. I'm guessing there's some trick to the bios setup I'm missing.

So, to rephrase: if all SATA drives (optical drives and hard drives) are failing to initialize (whether it be an OS on a CD or the Windows 7 OS on the hard drive), how would installing drivers for a windows XP install fix it? It's not even able to GET to the point where it loads the SATA channels, how can one use SATA on this board to run anything? I'm GUESSING there's something I'm overlooking in the BIOS or the board itself, despite trying a variety of things. I'm hoping someone with experience with this motherboard can steer me a little more strongly in a direction that would fix it.

 

[nenforcer]

I would remove the SATA optical disk for now and just use the PATA IDE CDROM drive to install XP onto the SATA Maxtor hard drive. Then you can add the SATA DVD Drive later.

 

[TheInternal]

that will probably be my next step. the concern still remains that the SATA hard drive already HAS an OS on it, and I can't load that either. >.<

 

[Iron Woode]

that will probably be my next step. the concern still remains that the SATA hard drive already HAS an OS on it, and I can't load that either. >.<

That's because it doesn't have the SATA drivers that you need already installed.

I have an MSI board that has the same issue. Unless I use the F6 floppy disk, it doesn't see my SATA drive.

Assuming you have XP pro sp1 you can just do a repair install after doing the F6 thing and save whatever data is on the drive.

 

[TheInternal]

Thanks for all the replies thus far. I had hoped I could skip all the annoying stuff with dirty old floppy disks, but that seems to not be the case. Things started looking up quickly after I installed the latest BIOS. As I've done in the past, the floppy raid drivers for windows XP install were indeed needed, and I'm currently in the near end part of installation. I originally had windows 7 on the system (on an IDE drive), but I kept having a blue screen every time the system screen turned back on (with an ATI x1600 Pro).

 

[nenforcer]

Ouch, Windows 7 on that board! I don't nVidia ever made officially supported Win 7 drivers for nForce 2 motherboards. Not even Vista either or XP 64bit for that matter.

Should still be a useable XP machine as I still use very near the same thing in my sig.

 

[TheInternal]

Well, I was able to install Windows XP on the hard drive, but I'm having issues with the hard drive being detected on boot (getting media test failures, despite trying different channels / cables).
It's a Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB SATA HD. I remember I had some issues with it until a BIOS was released for an MSI motherboard I had back in the day.

 

[nenforcer]

They're was a problem with older motherboards supporting these massive hard drives. In fact, for hard drives > 124GB you had to partition the hard drive into 2 or more partitions each less than 124GB.

Your motherboard should support that hard drive but if you are getting those issues I would try partitioning it into like 3 100GB partitions not 1 300GB or 2 150GB.

BIOS updates should have fixed this in most instances.

How did you partition the drive?

 

[nenforcer]

They're was a problem with older motherboards supporting these massive hard drives. In fact, for hard drives > 124GB you had to partition the hard drive into 2 or more partitions each less than 124GB.

Your motherboard should support that hard drive but if you are getting those issues I would try partitioning it into like 3 100GB partitions not 1 300GB or 2 150GB.

BIOS updates should have fixed this in most instances.

How did you partition the drive?

 

[TheInternal]

the problem with the maxline is apparently tied to it's server biased design. As with an older board when I first got the drive, I'm having to hot plug the drive at a certain point in boot up to have it be seen (apparently some power saving feature intended for server usage). Apparently the bios update didn't address this, so I'm trying to find a firmware update for the drive itself. I've seen some posts that indicate I may have to ground out a pin or something, but I'm hoping I can find a BIOS or firmware resolution first. I'm currently running the drive as a single 300 GB partition.
Another problem I'm encountering is a blue screen error, possibly tied to my x1600 Pro (with the most recent drivers from ATI), or maybe a driver conflict between the NVIDIA mcp and SB Audigy 2 ZS. Ah, the joy of older tech.