Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI SATA problem

[mystere]

For some reason I can't get my K8NXP-SLI to boot from SATA disk.

I am attempting to install XP SP2 (which seems to already have drivers for the nVidia chipset). I can boot from CD, and the drive is recognized. I can partition it, and install to it, but upon reboot it's as if the drive doesn't exist.

I can see the drive if I go into the RAID configuration, but i'm not using RAID so I don't create any arrays. I've tried both the nVidia ports (orange) and the SI ports (red). Same deal.

The manual is worthless, all it does is list all the settings, with no discussion on what they do.

This doesn't seem to be an XP driver issue, since it's not even starting the boot process. it seems to be a BIOS related issue, since if I leave the XP CD in the drive, it just tries to boot into that again as if there were no hard drive recognized.

I have no PATA devices other than my CD-Rom and DVD-Rom, and they're on the second channel.

I've seen mention that SATA should be selected in the boot order, but it isn't listed. Also, under boot devices it only lists add-in cards.

Anyone have any idea how to solve this? I can't believe I have to use a PATA boot disk.

 

[barkeley]

may be you need to create a RAID array with one HD?

 

[barkeley]

While I'ma at it, how is the chipset fan noise?

 

[Trente]

Use one of the four native SATA ports on your board (not the ones supported by the 3rd party chip) and also make sure you disable RAID functions for them, as you are using a single drive.

 

[mystere]

Thanks for the advice, however I've already tried disabling the RAID function, and as I said in my original message, I've tried both the native nVidia and SII ports, no luck.

Barkeley, you can't create a RAID azrray with one drive, it needs at least 2, and the chipset fan is fine.

 

[mystere]

Well, I finally got it working. I took Barkeley's advice and re-examined setting up a single disk array. I can't set up a single disk striping or mirroring, but I can set up a single disk JBOD, which is what I did.

Once I had set up a single disk JBOD, I could set the array as bootable, and then it appeared in the boot device list. Then I had to install the nvidia storage and raid drivers and it appears to be working.

There is absolutely NOTHING about this in the manual. What a pain.

 

[Joony]

I'm in the same situation except I made a computer using that motherboard for a friend So I can't really format everything at this point...

Does a single disk JBOD require you to format the drive?

 

[mystere]

No, you can elect not to clear the disk when you create the array.

However, you will probably have to reinstall Windows, since you'll need to go through the F6 load drivers part of setup.

 

[asmielia]

Mystere, I don't believe you've done this correctly. I really don't think you have to set up a JBOD array with a single drive. If it's anything like my BIOS, what you need to do is set your Boot Priority so that "Bootable Add-in Device" is the first one selected. Then you should be able to configure your "Bootable add-in device" somewhere else. Change that from "PCI Add-on slot" to "OnChip SATA RAID" or something like that. On another screen, you should be able to configure your OnChip SATA controller to operate in single drive mode.

Hope that's helpful. Good luck.

 

[mystere]

You're correct. After further exploration, I discovered what my problem was. Actually I think I have several problems, but that's something else.

It turns out there are two SATA/RAID settings in the BIOS, one of them is for RAID5 and the other for generic RAID. It is confusing, because when you disable the generic RAID it grey's out the primary and secondary controllers, making it seem like it's disabling the controller all together, however it is only disabling the RAID function.

Then, when that is disabled, you can go to your drive configuration and it will show 8 drive slots, the first four are for PATA, the second 4 are for the nVidia SATA controller.

Then, you can go into the boot device and choose the SATA drive you wish to boot from by moving it to the top of the priority.

Now, I have a final problem (which I think was exacerbating my earlier exploration). For some reason, my SATA drive seems to lock up on reboots. the BIOS seems to freeze when it's probing the SATA drive (and when I boot to bios and autodetect, the screen becomes corrupted). If I completely power down then power up, it's fine. But if I reboot, it's back to hanging.

 

[barkeley]

In the meantime I read about fixing a similar problem with this mb in an other forum and went back here convinced you hadn't disable totally the RAID. Glad to see you fixed it .
As for the the hard reboot needed hmmm...have you tried to maintain pushed the reset button a couple of seconds before releasing it?

 

[mystere]

It doesn't really matter if it's a soft reset or a hard reset. I have to completely power down the box for about 5 seconds and reboot, otherwise it just freezes while probing the drive. It may be a problem with the drive itself. I have a nother drive i'm going to try and see.

 

[JCOmega]

I am seing a similar problem with mine, if I set the raid function up, setup jbod I can see the drive, windows installs then crashes with a registry error durring the first boot, may be related to non sp1 or sp2 disk. Going to slip stream one and see if that helps. Gentoo on the other hand will just strait up not see the damn disk at all, either my 10,000 rpm raptor, or a 250gb sata we had laying around here at the shop. If I turn off all the raid function like you are saying, when I go into the bios it does show the additional "ide" devices, and crashes the system when probing the sata port that the drive is connected to, regardless if it's the 75gb or the 250. I doubt it's a drive issue. I have emailed gigabyte to see if there is a reason. Man I love gigabyte boards but if I can't use my sata, I'll end up spending more money on a linux proven sata card for it and just disable the onboards.
Side note, anyone have the dps module installed on theirs? I have two capacitors, one on the dps module and one on the board that touch. Wondering if this is similar problem with anyone else.

 

[davem0rgan]

I have a WD raptor which I setup as jbod on a silicon image sata port and had the following problem, I get blue screen with registry error, this was with XP pre sp1, but using XP sp2 I get an XP installation but occasionally a message box with the registry has recovered from an error appears. But this is just one of my problems. I have spent sometime trying to connect my raptor to use it as a single non-raid XP system disk. In the manual the SataII ports read 3 to 0 from top to bottom but on the motherboard they are actually 1,0,3,2 from top to bottom. Confusing! Eventually after connecting my raptor to port 0 and enabling Serial ATA 1 and Serial ATA 2 in the bios but disabling Raid on the ports it is recognised and I can install windows. But I have a second HD a Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB and no matter which of these SataII ports I connect it to, it is not recognised.

When windows boots I get the raptor show in the system tray as a removable device. Is this correct?

Have emailed gigabyte, see what they say.

UPDATE: My maxtor drive is recognised but only when there is nothing attached to the primary IDE port, i.e. DVD drive.

Have emailed gigabyte, see what they say.

 

[weshuang]

I'm having the same problem but I'm just not as sophisticated as the others in this thread.

By disabling RAID I can get the option to change the Bootable AddIn Device. During bootup I can see that the SATA HDD is detected now as Channel 4 master, which is also the selection now in bootable add in device. By boot sequence is floppy, hdd, cdrom.

However, upon reboot it gives me an error saying it could not read from the selected boot disk. This is after I have booted from the windows cd and run setup to the point where it reboots to complete setup in windows.

Can someone give me a pointer here?

-- update -- never mind got it to work!

 

[snedger]

mystere,
I finished installing my Gigabyte in the wee small hours and it wasn't the smoothest of rides.
First windows install didn't work, but it was unattended so don't know what went wrong. Second time worked.
I'm having problems rebooting after BIOS changes or reboot after software/device install, the system hangs inspecting IDE drives which is stupid as the only IDE is the DVD ROM, which is already listed on the boot screen. I've discovered that the only way to get things moving is to power off/on and not reset.
As far as SATA goes, if you use the Nvidia ones (nearest the IDEs) then you won't need to have a SATA driver floppy handy.
BTW at work today I downloaded the mobo manual and noticed that the manual has been updated. My manual is Rev.1001 and the download is 1002.
I got confused with the Nvidia SATA # labelling, which on the mobo is not consecutive, but in the 1001 manual is. It turns out that the mobo is labelled correctly and this is reflected in the rev. 1002 manual. The sequence goes 1,0,3,2 (is there some sort of RAID helpfulness logic here?)
Gigabyte haven't shown the details of the mobo manual revision and I'm too tired to check for anymore.
Well, well, I can hear that I've just got sound!
This note is coming from my old PC, so don't assume that I've got my Gigabyte plumbed into the home network yet, that is next.
Cheers
snedger

 

[DagStarz]

Can I join in?.....

I'm having a few problems with my Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI and SATA drives. I had the same problem as mystere, but now after reading through these postings it now recognises the drive/s as part of the BIOS boot and when I try to add a windows xp sp2 build. Problem is that during the windows install it blue screens when it copies the relevant system files just after formatting the partition, saying that I do not have enough hard drive space or a driver error? I have tried 3 discs (one a 64bit version) and two hard drives, 1 x Maxtor SATA (160gb) + 1 x WD SATA (40GB), all fail around the same point. I also have a Maxtor (300 GB) which is the same as davem0rgan, although my one is temperamental as it sometimes will find it and sometimes not, very strange.

Any help?

I have emailed Gigabyte Tech Support on Saturday, so hopefully hear back from them soon but I would appreciate any advice?

Thanks in advance

 

[November Wolf]

Originally posted by: JCOmega
I have two capacitors, one on the dps module and one on the board that touch. Wondering if this is similar problem with anyone else.

I have the same thing but it does not seem to be a problem. I bent one capacitor back a little bit and it still touches but just barely.

 

[November Wolf]

Originally posted by: weshuang
I'm having the same problem but I'm just not as sophisticated as the others in this thread.

By disabling RAID I can get the option to change the Bootable AddIn Device. During bootup I can see that the SATA HDD is detected now as Channel 4 master, which is also the selection now in bootable add in device. By boot sequence is floppy, hdd, cdrom.

However, upon reboot it gives me an error saying it could not read from the selected boot disk. This is after I have booted from the windows cd and run setup to the point where it reboots to complete setup in windows.

Can someone give me a pointer here?

-- update -- never mind got it to work!

What did you do to fix this? I have the same problem and its driving me insane.

 

[weshuang]

Originally posted by: November Wolf

Originally posted by: weshuang
I'm having the same problem but I'm just not as sophisticated as the others in this thread.

By disabling RAID I can get the option to change the Bootable AddIn Device. During bootup I can see that the SATA HDD is detected now as Channel 4 master, which is also the selection now in bootable add in device. By boot sequence is floppy, hdd, cdrom.

However, upon reboot it gives me an error saying it could not read from the selected boot disk. This is after I have booted from the windows cd and run setup to the point where it reboots to complete setup in windows.

Can someone give me a pointer here?

-- update -- never mind got it to work!

What did you do to fix this? I have the same problem and its driving me insane.

the key was getting the SATA drive to be shown as a selection in the Bootable Addin Device window. I then re-did the windows setup, and this time when it rebooted after completing the DOS portion of the setup it successfully booted from the SATA and continued with the windows portion of setup.

 

[November Wolf]

Originally posted by: weshuang

Originally posted by: November Wolf

Originally posted by: weshuang
I'm having the same problem but I'm just not as sophisticated as the others in this thread.

By disabling RAID I can get the option to change the Bootable AddIn Device. During bootup I can see that the SATA HDD is detected now as Channel 4 master, which is also the selection now in bootable add in device. By boot sequence is floppy, hdd, cdrom.

However, upon reboot it gives me an error saying it could not read from the selected boot disk. This is after I have booted from the windows cd and run setup to the point where it reboots to complete setup in windows.

Can someone give me a pointer here?

-- update -- never mind got it to work!

What did you do to fix this? I have the same problem and its driving me insane.

the key was getting the SATA drive to be shown as a selection in the Bootable Addin Device window. I then re-did the windows setup, and this time when it rebooted after completing the DOS portion of the setup it successfully booted from the SATA and continued with the windows portion of setup.

What a pain. The manual was just about useless. Glad were all back on track now...Thanks

 

[lukewola]

I have the same problem with my ga-k8nxp-sli. I am from Poland i purchased this mainboard recently and it have some serious problems with Maxtor DiamondMax 10 160GB NCQ hard drive. The mainboard often don`t see Maxtor hard drive usually when I reboot system. When I completely power off and on everythng is ok. My Bios version is F6. I emailed Gigabyte and wait for answer. I think that gigabyte should make new Bios which should fix that serial-ata problems.

 

[tsmori]

You need to play around with the Integrated Peripherals part of the BIOS. I couldn't discover what the Scheme was, but you need to try enabling and disabling different SATA raid channels until your drive is detected, hopefully on channel 2 (1st sata channel after the IDE channels).

 

[jobh8R]

I used to have same problem ..if you guys tried to install this sata raid 5 driver via gigabyte MB driver cd this could be....there's is something wrong with sata raid driver in the cd which comes with mb ....that's because i chose "last known stable windows log on " (or something like that i barely remember the whole sentence)option while it's booting ..then i downloaded the sata raid driver from the adress below...
http://tw.giga-byte.com/Mother...river_GA-K8NXP-SLI.htm
why don't you just try at least once ? i strongly believe that would help you out..

 

[DagStarz]

This board is giving me a headache, it sometimes boots ok, I have got it seeing the drives ok but after the bios sometimes it just hangs? Then when it does go through after pulling out the power and leaving it for 3mins I can't put windows onto it? It just blue screens or bombs out, I have used 3 cds sp2, sp1a and 64bit version, none work, have tried 3 hard drives no luck and memory and minimal hardware setup but no luck, anyone else having any issues with this, tech support at giga-byte are sh!te (ooo that rhymes) they haven't got back to me.

I knew I should have stayed with ASUS!