Serial ATA Problems

[Dinjo]

I recently bought a Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra Mobo and a 120Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA V Hard Drive.I set it up with a AthlonXP 2000+, a 64Mb Ge-Force 440 graphics card, 256 of PC2700 DDR Ram,Lite-on 52X Cd-rom and standard floppy drive +350W PSU. I installed Win98 SE and everything was fine until I installed the SataLink driver from the M/Board CD. It needed a restart after installing the driver but it froze during startup and refused to load. I reformatted the C:\ Partition and tried to load Win XP Pro. I copied the SataLink driver to a floppy and specified it when asked by the win XP setup. Once again, the PC needed a restart and promptly froze after the POST.
I tried the installation using the SataLink add-on card supplied with the Mobo and I also tried direct connection using an adapter cable that I Made to connect to the standard PSU lead . After countless hours working on it, trying various ways to install the OS I still can't get it to accept the SataLink driver. I tried the raid driver also but it didn't make any difference.

I'm just wondering has anyone else come across this problem or does anyone know how to get to install the driver. Any thoughts on the subject will be gratefully appreciated

 

[eklass]

add-on card?

i didn't get no add-on card with my ga-7vaxp ultra... at least i'm don't think i did. maybe i did. who knows

anyway, this doesn't sound like good news to me.. i have this mobo and was planning to go sata this fall

did you try getting the latest driver from seagate off thier website? please post if you come up with a solution

 

[Dinjo]

The SATA card is only a kind of bracket that you can use to connect the SATA drives. It doesn't have any chipset and doesnt connect to the Mobo.I loaded 98SE on a standard 2Gb IDE drive and then I ran the Seagate DiskWizard to format and partition the SATA drive. The wizard also allows you to copy the system over to the new drive and make it your boot drive. The Satalink drivers loaded perfectly on the IDE drive and I copied it over to the SATA drive. When I tried booting from the new (SATA) drive, the system froze just after the POST. All this was done with the latest drivers from the Gigabyte site. I sent them a message about this problem but, after 15 days waiting, they never replied. I hope that someone out there will have a solution to this prob. and if I do overcome it myself I will certainly post the answer.
I will be speaking to someone at Seagate UK on monday to see if they can shed any light on the matter.

Living in hope!!