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A8V SATA/RAID Controller Issue

O

opticalenigma

n00b
Joined
Jul 12, 2007
Messages
3
So I’m definitely involved in hard drive heck with my computer at the moment. I built the computer a few years ago and it had run solidly until the beginning of this year. Then it crashed – painfully hard – but I brought the system back up after one of my SATAs failed. After I replaced the drives, the system has been more or less limping ever since.

The box consists of:
ASUS 8AV ATX Motherboard
Generic PSU (can’t remember the wattage)
AMD 64 3400+
1GB Low Latency Corsair RAM
Sapphire Radeon X800XL
300GB Seagate SATA (on the Promise controller, forced SATA-150 engaged)
150GB Seagate SATA (also on the Promise controller)
250GB Western Digital IDE (IDE Master)
Pioneer CD-R/DVD-R Burner
Sony OEM DVD Drive

So I’ve been plagued with HD problems all year and I’ve finally had enough. I replaced one of the 150GB SATAs for the 300GB SATA listed above, put a clean install of Windows on the box and thought I was done with it. Of course, the system started acting up – it would lock up briefly (5 or 10 seconds) when it was doing something more or less intensive from either hard drive. Looking in event viewer, I started to see plenty of errors involving “viaraid” stating that the controller didn’t respond in the necessary amount of time.

So I thought it was possibly the SATA cables as they seemed a little flimsy and didn’t lock in as nicely as I would like. That didn’t help. So I installed the Promise TX SATA drivers (not the raid drivers) and plugged the drives into that controller – figuring that maybe that would solve this issue as it was on a different controller. I disabled the VIA controller in the BIOS and crossed my fingers. No such luck, the Promise controller had the same problem.

I’ve ruled out the HDs as in issue because the 300GB Seagate is brand new. Since I’m writing this from work, I haven’t run MemTest386, but I ran SeaTools and found no problems with the drives before I left.

The system runs a little hot – ambient of 85F and cpu 100F – and it’s a little dusty, so I’m stumped. There haven’t been any other symptoms. I now read the issues with the adaptive overclocking included with the board, but I haven’t really overclocked the system other than that. I’ll force the defaults when I get home from work.

The only thing I can think of is the PSU may be starting to fail. I’ve tried to watch the voltages through ASUSProbe, but haven’t seen anything unusual. The supply is uber-generic and shoddy looking, but I don’t know what symptoms I would be looking for to determine whether or not the PSU is actually failing. Thinking about it now, I may be overloading the PSU, but I’m not sure as I can’t remember the wattage at the moment. (It would be anything more than standard for a cheap enthusiast case circa early 2005).

Does anyone have any idea what else I should do?
 
Have you made sure you set your new 300 gig sata 2.0 drive as a 1.0 drive with a jumper? Yeah, I know, you listed it as set.

I have the same board and noticed that I get hd controller failure events when I put more than 2 ide disk devices on it. Doesn't matter if they are optical or hds.

Its Scary to look at the system event logs and find hw controller/drive failure messages.
 
Try setting your PCI latency to 64 clks.

This is a driver issue. Dont go replacing any hardware. Its nasty to track down and I cant remember all the details.

It goes something like this, windows wants disk data and issues a commend to the controller to go get it, the controller is still busy doing something and does not reply "I am busy, wait a minute" in the time windows is expecting a reply. So windows complains in the event log thinking the controller or disk is going bad.

this also come up a lot when regular desktop drives are put into raid configurations.
If you look at the RE and RE2 western digital drives somewhere there is a blurb about how those raid optimized drives report "events" back to the controller faster or whatever and prevent the same "controller not responding in time" msg. Thats what got me on to the whole deal.

Hmm your lucky, here is what I think is happening, remember even if not in raid mode I think those are raid type controllers. But even if not, this is what is going on, what to do about it , thats the rub.

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf

i want to think I saw a windows registry edit that told windows to wait longer for the drive controller to answer but I cant find it/remember.
 
BillParish~

That way you put the issue definitely seems logical, usually I am doing something else -- loading something or somewhat. The only I question I have is whether or not what you described will cause the system to hang for five to ten seconds.

However, the setting the PCI latency is a good tip. I'll check that out.

I got this board way back in the day because it was pretty well-known here at [H]. If anyone has some other tips involving this issue I'd appreciate -- specially the one concerning the Windows registry entry that Bill mentioned.
 
The error you mentioned would obviously point towards the drive controllers but it seems strange that both the VIA and Promise controllers would be exhibiting identical issues... You didn't specify which drive the OS is installed on either (that I saw), or if you're OC'ing.

I'd run Memtest first off just to be absolutely sure it isn't a memory problem, and I'd try and figure out your PSU's wattage at the very 'least (if not outright testing the system w/a different one).

seto said:
Have you made sure you set your new 300 gig sata 2.0 drive as a 1.0 drive with a jumper? Yeah, I know, you listed it as set.

I have the same board and noticed that I get hd controller failure events when I put more than 2 ide disk devices on it. Doesn't matter if they are optical or hds.

Its Scary to look at the system event logs and find hw controller/drive failure messages.
Click to expand...

I've had 1 SATA drive (160gb Seagate), 2 PATA drives (250gb WD that I took out of a WD enclosure that died & old 80gb Maxtor drive), AND 2 PATA optical drives (NEC DVD-RW & old vanilla DVD drive) working just fine on my A8V for over a couple years now. No errors or anything. Well, originally it was only one HDD but I've had the other two HDDs in there for over a year and a half at 'least. I've also had the OS installed on all three of the drives and working just fine...

I have all three of those HDDs on the Promise controller as I heard it handled OCs better when I originally set up my system (80gb drive is slaved to the 250gb), I've had the VIA SATA controller disabled in the BIOS from day one. /shrug Got both optical drives on a separate IDE port each also (for no real reason, the 80gb drive was meant to be temporary even though I've left it in there).
 
BillParish~
I just checked the PCI Latency in the BIOS, it was already set to 64.

Impulse~
I'm running a 450 watt PSU. There's no brand markings that I can determine.
Currently, I'm running a copy of Windows XP SP2 which was last patched yesterday.

As I just rebooted to check the BIOS PCI Latency setting, Windows was kind enough to tell my it had recovered from a serious error on startup. Sure enough, it was hard drive response related:

"Problem caused by a hard disk drive error

Windows was temporarily unable to read your hard disk drive. This problem is general in nature and we are unable to determine the specific cause of the problem from the error report. In most cases this problem is temporary and can be ignored."

So, that being out of the way, I'm stumped. Although I haven't had the time to run MemTest. Outside of some goofy RAM, it looks like I'll be looking for a new PSU or new motherboard unless I'm missing another possible fix.

~Edit
I forgot to mention that I'm still running the adaptive OC that comes with the board. As I noted before, I had read previously that the board has some difficulties determining the correct values for just stock operation. I would manually set these myself, but I'm having a little difficulty finding the correct numbers.
 
I've never heard of this board having problems w/stock settings and I read a couple long threads specifically about this board before I bought it... Have you even tried stock/auto settings? Or at the very 'least going in and manually setting the PCI/AGP frequency lock?

I've run mine at both stock speeds (when diagnosing a memory problem) and the OC settings in my sig and I didn't notice any difference in stability. Is your OS drive on the Promise or VIA controller? As I said before, I don't think the VIA SATA controller handles OCs well... I've never had issues w/the Promise one.

I wouldn't trust the adaptive OC settings at all tbh, and it's not hard to figure out stock settings.
 
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