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Third SATA drive fubars boot?

Z

ZoomBoy

n00b
Joined
Sep 9, 2005
Messages
34
Hey guys, hoping the expertise of this board can help me solve my problem.

I just recently purchased a WD Black 1TB SATA drive for my PC, it will be the third drive hooked up to my mobo (Asus A8N-SLI Premium), cables are good, following SATA 1-4 order, etc.

Whenever I hook up a third SATA drive to my computer, it freezes once Windows starts booting. Drive is recognized in the BIOS and even Windows whenever the 3rd drive is removed, doesn't matter if its my old Seagate drive or the new one, whenever a 3rd drive is added my computer won't boot.

Any ideas? My BIOS firmware is the latest revision (from 2005 :eek:)
 
This motherboard seems to be notorious for being finicky with its SATA ports. There are 8 SATA ports - four are black 3GB/sec SATA II, four are orange 1.5GB/sec SATA I. I'm assuming you're using the black ones. This motherboard has two separate RAID controllers, one for the black ports, one for the orange ports.

First, have you installed the latest chipset drivers for the motherboard?
Second, have you disabled RAID on both controllers?
Third, from this thread, I found this:

If you do not have any SATA drives plugged into channel 3 & 4 on your motherboard, simply go into the BIOS and disable SATA channel 3&4. When you boot up into windows it will remove the other SATA controller (due to you not using those extra channels) and viola! Problem solved! I have since had NO BSoDs or and problems transfering data between HDs.

I guess I'm a bit screwed if I want to get a few more SATA HDs as I'll have to enable those channels again and they will likely conflict (which I think was what was causing the system to become so unstable).
Click to expand...

You may possibly just have a defective motherboard.
 
Thanks for the tips so far. Well I have no idea what the hell I did, I played around in the BIOS for a bit - disabled SATA 3 and 4, plugged the drive in - booted into Windows, restarted, enabled SATA 3 and 4 and then rebooted and the drive is now recognized and booting fine.

I'm going to put a few bytes of data on it and test it for a few days but I think it might be working now, what happened? I have no idea.
 
From stuff that I read while I was googling this stuff, you may possibly see things working intermittently, like working only 3 out of 4 bootups. If that's the case, I'd probably give up and swap out the motherboard for a less finicky one.
 
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