SATA-II Compatability??

[DarkaneZ28]

I haven't had much look searching around, but I don't know if I looked hard enough.

Anyways, my dad bought a bunch of components to build my brother a computer.
AMD 3000+ venice
ASUS A8V Deluxe
2 x 512mb Corsair ram
1 single Hitachi SATA-II 80GB hard drive

I wasn't sure if my dad meant to get a SATA-II or not lol, but it's here after waiting a month for tigerdirect to send it. Now when I was first trying to install windows, it kept giving me an error during boot-up saying that no device was attached to fasttrack controller or bios not installed. I had no idea it was a SATA-II lol, so I was thinking all my problems were because I needed to install a raid or some driver for one of the controllers. I couldn't even install the new drivers (using a floppy and pressing f6 at windows install). I then decided to slap the hard drive in my rig and then try it, and once again it wasn't being detected at all. I went to the hitachi website and looked for anything that would give me an idea about the hard drive, and it was then that I learned it was a SATA-II.

So, is SATA-II compatible with the A8V motherboard??? If it is, how do I go about installing it? I really hope it can work, I'd hate to tell my dad that he has to deal with tigerdirect again lol

 

[Elledan]

SATA-II drives have to be set to SATA-I mode manually, AFAIK. Hitachi uses a software utility (bootdisk?) for this.

 

[DarkaneZ28]

Crap....that doesn't really sound like fun

 

[UICompE02]

SATA-II drives have to be set to SATA-I mode manually, AFAIK. Hitachi uses a software utility (bootdisk?) for this.

Are you sure about that?

I have several SATA II 3gb/s drives here that seamlessly work at 1.5 or 3.0gb/s without changing anything manually.

According to the SATA spec, the speed negotiation should happen automatically and the highest common speed will be chosen between the two devices. However, there may be exceptions to this, I can imagine, but I haven't personally seen any drives that need to be manually changed to operate at a slower speed.

 

[Elledan]

Are you sure about that?

I have several SATA II 3gb/s drives here that seamlessly work at 1.5 or 3.0gb/s without changing anything manually.

According to the SATA spec, the speed negotiation should happen automatically and the highest common speed will be chosen between the two devices. However, there may be exceptions to this, I can imagine, but I haven't personally seen any drives that need to be manually changed to operate at a slower speed.

I have heard that the procedure I mentioned is necessary for some drives. It was even mentioned in a number of threads in this very forum, IIRC.

Of course, it could also be that my memory is failing me

 

[Dark Ember]

Are you sure about that?

I have several SATA II 3gb/s drives here that seamlessly work at 1.5 or 3.0gb/s without changing anything manually.

According to the SATA spec, the speed negotiation should happen automatically and the highest common speed will be chosen between the two devices. However, there may be exceptions to this, I can imagine, but I haven't personally seen any drives that need to be manually changed to operate at a slower speed.

Thats how its supposed to work. Part of being compliant with SATAII is backwards compatability with SATA150. So the speed negotiation and handshaking should happen automatically.

Maybe Hitachi's firmware is broken... Have you looked for any firmware updates?