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Sata HDD on an A8n-SLI

Are you having a problem with your SATA HDD? The reason I ask is that I had a problem getting my SATA DVD/CD drive working with my A8N SLI Deluxe. The only way I was able to fix it was by updating both the mobo BIOS and the nForce chipset drivers. Have you tried this?

One thing: doing the above seems to have broken one of my ethernet ports.

Good luck,

Carl
 
I am having trouble with my A8N-SLI SATA as well. I have a samsung sata 80gb drive installed and the bios only recognizes it intermittently. If the bios detects it on startup then all is well but otherwise I have to keep rebooting until it acknowledges the drive. Anyone else have a similar problem?
 
The Raptor74 in my system is attached to the A8N-SLI via the nVidia SATA connector, and since the NF4 chipset natively support SATA drives,

the WinXP install went smoothly, just like installing the OS onto any PATA (IDE) drive, with not a single issue whatsoever for the past 4 months.
 
So there should be no problems doing a new install with only a sata drive? I don't have a floppy drive, so I won't be able to install any drivers.
 
Originally posted by: johnh123
So there should be no problems doing a new install with only a sata drive? I don't have a floppy drive, so I won't be able to install any drivers.
Click to expand...

If you connect your SATA drive to the native nVidia SATA connector, you don't need to use a floppy to install any drivers during WindowsXP installation.

To make Windows installation simpler, just physically disconnect any IDE HD drive from the A8N-SLI mobo before installing the OS.

Then once the OS's installed, reconnect the IDE HDs onto the mobo.
 
There were a lot of problems with Maxtor Diamondmax 9/10 drives with NF4 boards initially. I don't know if it's been solved or not. Assuming yes since I don't see the problem pop up as much lately on the AT forums.
 
Matrox VPR (AKA Best Buy). Thanks for putting your info down. I was actually looking into getting a WD drive. But, now I heard SATA II has hit the streets and I think I'm going to wait for those.
 
Originally posted by: akugami
There were a lot of problems with Maxtor Diamondmax 9/10 drives with NF4 boards initially. I don't know if it's been solved or not. Assuming yes since I don't see the problem pop up as much lately on the AT forums.
Click to expand...

I never heard a resolution anywhere, man. Supposedly Maxtor had updated firmware for the drives, but it wasnt available via the web, you had to jump thru tech support email hoops to get it.

I had 2 Maxtor 160gig SATAs that would show up and disappear on the Nvidia controller randomly, but my Raptors have always behaved, in RAID 0. So I switched them to the Sil controller and said to hell with it. 🙂

 
I've been having trouble as well with my A8N-SLI Deluxe. I boot into the windows installation program and install it seemingly with no trouble. The computer reboots and freezes up at the screen showing what Hard Drives etc are physically installed in the computer and random spots on the screen change to random and colored ASCII characters. I have used both SATA controllers and their RAID Drivers and also without drivers. It does the same thing on another computer with a plain A8N-SLI (non Deluxe) and on my computer with a different SATA HD. The drive works flawlessly if I boot from my old PATA HD. Any Ideas?
 
Originally posted by: Rev Noch
I've been having trouble as well with my A8N-SLI Deluxe. I boot into the windows installation program and install it seemingly with no trouble. The computer reboots and freezes up at the screen showing what Hard Drives etc are physically installed in the computer and random spots on the screen change to random and colored ASCII characters. I have used both SATA controllers and their RAID Drivers and also without drivers. It does the same thing on another computer with a plain A8N-SLI (non Deluxe) and on my computer with a different SATA HD. The drive works flawlessly if I boot from my old PATA HD. Any Ideas?
Click to expand...

1. Make sure you have an up to date BIOS. 1008 is the last non-beta release.

2. Bad SATA HDD's? If you get the same problem on two different boards, that would be my guess. See if there is a new firmware for the HDD from the manufacturer's website.

3. What power supplies are you running in these systems? Power can be an issue with some drives.
 
Some early bios (1003) on the A8N-SLI didn't recognise some Maxtor DM10 drives with certain firmwares. It's been solved since then both on the mobo's bios and on the firmware of new Maxtor drives. As for other brands I haven't heard any problems.
 
I finally got it to work. After endless software, bios, firmware, etc updates. What I ended up noticing is that the drives that were not working were partitioned and formatted after windows was booted using another hard drive. I was trying to backup my stuff from my old HD before installing windows on the new one.

It appears that computer management does the partitions differently than the utility when installing windows. Computer management seems to leave only 1mb of unpartitioned space when making the full capacity of the drive a single partition. When I deleted the partition and then made a new one with the windows installation utility, it left 8MB of space free and then the drive worked like a charm.
 
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