Mobo not detecting HDD

[Unregistered]

I've got a big snag and I'm hoping someone can help me

I'm setting up my first system, here are the specs:

ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
AMD Athlon 2800
Maxtor 250 gig SATA/150 HDD
Plextor CDRW
Pioneer DVDRW
Radeon 9600 pro
512 mb ram
floppy drive

When I first booted up the system, I went into the bios to try to detect the SATA HDD. The bios detected the cd and dvd drives on the secondary IDE fine. There's nothing on the primary IDE. However, it won't detect the SATA drive. It's plugged in to SATA RAID 1 on the mobo (RAID 2 is the only other choice). Once I tried detecting the SATA drive and it failed, I checked to see if there was anything in the bios related to SATA or RAID, and there isn't. This is an Award/Phoenix BIOS, rev 1008. I set my boot sequence to CDRW, floppy and then HDD-0.

After choosing Exit/Save changes, the system does not reboot -- the monitor goes to black and the LED flashed on and off as if there is no longer a signal. The PC itself stays powered up and doesn't cycle or anything, although the keyboard lights do flash once.

After a cold reboot, my system now says, after POST, that it detected an improper shutdown and is in safe mode, and to press del to enter bios and set cpu speed (the speed is set fine, it's at 166 mhz, which I think is correct for my 333FSB chip).

So, no matter if I try to boot with the windows xp home cd in the cd drive or the boot floppy disks I made from microsoft's site, I cannot get past the bios screens to actually start my system booting from the CD.

Any suggestions?

 

[altazakin]

also...

I did try booting without CD and DVD connected, no change.

Tried booting without HDD connected, instead connected a very old (1995) WD 1 gig drive to primary master, with jumper on master and also with jumper off, did not work. Same shutdown/safe mode message.

Tried reseating the mobo power supply connector and the ram.

Tried reset buttons and ctrl-alt-del but those either lead to the bios, a black screen with white cursor, or nothing (total black screen).

Also tried using a different SATA cable on the HDD. HDD does spin up (gets warm to the touch).

 

[hunterr83]

I'm a bit confused. Is this a newly built computer, or are you attaching this hard drive to an exsiting computer? Are you trying to install Windows for the first time on this drive, if this is a new computer? Also, have you tried replacing the SATA drive with a drive that you know works and tried booting up the computer normally--just to make sure the SATA drive isn't broken?

 

[altazakin]

Thanks for replying!

Yes, this is a brand new system, windows has never been installed on the drive (nothing has. it's right out of the box). I did try booting the computer with an old hdd that does work, it's just very old (1995).

The computer won't boot up normally because it keeps saying it was shut down improperly, and goes into safe mode directly after POST.

 

[hunterr83]

I'm still a bit confused. But in the interest of time, try this if you havn't done so already: Take out the SATA drive and put in a working IDE hard drive with the rest of the components in place. Boot the computer. If it boots fine, then the SATA drive is the cause of the lack of detection.

Take out the IDE drive and put in the SATA drive into a normal slot, not a RAID slot, if possible (I'm not too familar with SATA drives, I have never worked with one). Have a Windows XP CD in the CD ROM so that it can boot up into Windows setup.

If you've already done what I've described, does that fix it? If not, what error do you get?

Sorry for not understanding fully what you said in the previous post.

 

[altazakin]

Sorry, I don't mean to confuse you If you need something explained more I can do my best.

>>Take out the IDE drive and put in the SATA drive into a normal slot, not a RAID slot, if possible

It's not possible, those are the only connectors possible with a SATA drive.

I did try a working IDE, but I still could not get it to boot because the BIOS does not restart the computer after I chose exit/save changes. Just turns off the screen and the computer stays on. So when I hit the power switch off, then turn it back on again, the bios says I've improperly shut the machine down and it goes into safe mode. It's like a neverending loop.

 

[Logical_1]

OK, let's start off this way.

Pull all the drives off the system and boot. The result with no drives attached at all should be the message "PLEASE INSERT A BOOTABLE DISK OR CDROM" or something like that. Do you get that?

If you get that, plug the floppy in and find a floppy disk that is bootable. Does that boot the system?

If yes, plug in the CDROM and put in a bootable CD (Windows XP will work fine). Does that boot the system?

If yes, plug in the old hard drive (1gb) to the system, but boot from the floppy (preferably Win98 or similar boot disk). Does the floppy boot the system with the hard drive plugged in (I assume you can tell it to boot the floppy in the BIOS and having to do such hasn't escaped you)?

If the floppy booted the system with the old hard drive plugged in, use the tools from the floppy (hence saying a Win98 boot floppy is preferable) to transfer the system files to the hard drive (I also assume that you have partitioned and formated the drive already, if not, do so) using the command from the Win98 boot floppy "sys c:". Now reboot without the floppy in the system so that the hard drive is the boot device. Does it boot the system to a "C:\> " prompt?

If yes, plug in the SATA drive. It is not unusual for the drive on the SATA controller to not detect in the BIOS of the system. The SATA controllers have their own BIOS and are not listed as the Primary or Secondary Master or Slave device in the system, but instead are listed on a separate screen when it tells you what SATA controller chipset is found and proceeds to enumerate those devices. Check the system BIOS settings for an option to use the SATA controller as either RAID or IDE/SATA (could be listed as either). Pick IDE/SATA instead of RAID if the option exists. Try to boot from the floppy.

What does it do? Does it boot from the floppy successfully? Does it give an error message? Does it boot from another device? Does the screen go blank? If the screen goes blank, how long have you left it that way? What kind of power supply is in the system?

Go through the above steps and let us know where you end up so that we may help you better isolate the problem and fix it.

Logical_1

 

[altazakin]

Unfortunately, after two hours on the phone with ASUS tech support, the PC no longer even posts

It goes straight into boot block, which is a problem I had with the first ASUS mobo I tried.

When it gets there, nothing can be done -- clearing the cmos doesn't work and neither does attempting to flash the bios.

Before that happened, I had tried booting from a bootable floppy (Win XP set of 6 disks, downloaded from Microsoft). When I attempted that, the BIOS errored out (BIOS ROM checksum error) and said that it could not find awdflash.exe, the flashing program for that BIOS.

When I attempt to boot from the Win XP CD, either in the CDROM or the DVD, it says there is no system disk, please insert system disk in drive A.

I've had it with this mobo. This is the second go around and it doesn't appear that anything works with it.

Everything had been set up correctly, as far as I know, but after exiting the mobo's BIOS the SATA BIOS never appeared -- the screen goes black, monitor's LED flashes, and comp stays on. I've left it that way for approx. 5 minutes with no luck. The power supply is an ATX 400W from Allied.

I bit the bullet and bought a different mobo and an IDE drive from newegg. I bought an ABIT NF7-S and a 40 Seagate IDE drive, and will try to set that up before I bother with the Maxtor SATA. Hopefully I can get Windows XP installed on the new Seagate, and then add the SATA after it's up and running.

I really hope I didn't make a bad decision -- this is my first time and I feel totally helpless at this point. I feel like I bought a gigantic, expensive paperweight

Thanks for your help, you were very detailed and I really appreciate it.

 

[Wargasm]

the bios is not looking for a parallel ide drive rite ?
it is set to sata rite ?
had a batch of comps here that had sata drives cept the bios was looking for ide drives

 

[altazakin]

>>it is set to sata rite ?

That's the weird thing -- there's absolutely nothing in the bios that refers to sata at all

 

[Wargasm]

does the bios detect the harddrive at all ??
with the MSI mobo's i had to look real hard to see the prob .