GA-K8N Pro-SLI & SATA I

[goliath443]

For the love of God, someone help me!!!

I recently purchased the GA-K8N Pro-SLI mobo from Gigabyte. I cannot, using Nvidia's newest drivers, get this stinkin' mobo to recognize my SATA I HDD. I disabled RAID, tried plugging my PATA DVD drive into IDE2, tried using Gigabyte's drivers, messed with the jumpers on both the DVD & SATA drive, updated the BIOS, and on and on. if anyone cares to help, I would appreciate it greatly.

 

[Lan]

I own this MoBo, and just bought it as well. What exactly is going on? Do you get a specific error? Are you sure your sata I hard drive is plugged into the sata 0 port? Is it detecting all of your other devices? I will say that it takes awhile for it to detect my drives (around a full 10 seconds or so).

Check all of your connections, and make sure that they are plugged into the proper ports, as well as seated properly. I find that with my sata drives both connectors can easily come loose on the hard drive side. Let me know and I'll help as best I can.

 

[Volcar]

try flashing the bios. what version is it? you will see either F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 when it starts up. try flashing up to F7 cause F8 has some problems

 

[goliath443]

The current version is F9 (dated 02/10/2006). I reverted to the BIOS that came with the mobo & nothing. I even tried connecting another HDD to the mobo & nothing. Any other help would be great because I'm about to return this junk.

 

[Lan]

The current version is F9 (dated 02/10/2006). I reverted to the BIOS that came with the mobo & nothing. I even tried connecting another HDD to the mobo & nothing. Any other help would be great because I'm about to return this junk.

I understand your fustration. However you didn't answer any of my questions. I can't help you if you don't work with me. What is the exact error that you are getting? You said that you tried connecting another HDD to the mobo, what kind of drive? How did you connect it? And also I asked if you made sure it's plugged into the sata 0 slot, which is in the middle of the four, not on one side. Also is it detecting any other Drives, such as your CD-ROM drives and floppy drive?

It is possible that you got a bad board, but as I said earlier I am running this board and it runs fine.

Please give all of your hardware specs as well as the information I asked for, and I'll try and help you out. If you are patient and we can fix the problem, you will get your new setup that much quicker.

 

[goliath443]

Exact error: during Windows setup, at the very beginning after you press F6 to load SATA drivers, setup says it cannot find a drive.

The other drive I tried to connect: WD 250GB SATA II connected to SATA 0.

DVD-ROM & floppy are being detected fine.

My specs:
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3200+
MoBo - Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
RAM - 1GB (2 x 512MB) OCZ 2-2-2-5
Video - eVGA 7800GT
Hard Drive - 160GB Western Digital Caviar SATA I
DVD-ROM - Lite-On Lightscribe

 

[Lan]

Exact error: during Windows setup, at the very beginning after you press F6 to load SATA drivers, setup says it cannot find a drive.

The other drive I tried to connect: WD 250GB SATA II connected to SATA 0.

DVD-ROM & floppy are being detected fine.

My specs:
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3200+
MoBo - Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
RAM - 1GB (2 x 512MB) OCZ 2-2-2-5
Video - eVGA 7800GT
Hard Drive - 160GB Western Digital Caviar SATA I
DVD-ROM - Lite-On Lightscribe

I see. And there is your problem. You don't load seperate SATA drivers during Windows Setup. As long as your BIOS detects the hard drive, you are fine. Pressing F6 during Windows setup is only if you need to load a driver for a hardware RAID setup.

So the bottom line is, unless you are trying to setup a RAID array, don't bother pressing F6 during Windows setup. Let it finish getting into the setup program and setup Windows normally. Everything should go fine. Try that and let me know how it goes.

 

[goliath443]

No, not pressing F6 during setup didn't work either. In the BIOS: under Integrated Peripheals, above 1st Bootable Device, & by pressing enter, the only thing that shows is Bootable Add-In Card. I don't know if this helps, but my drive certainly doesn't show up anywhere in the BIOS. Crazy stuff.

 

[Lan]

Okay. What does happen if you don't press F6, the same thing? In the BIOS under "Standard CMOS Settings" or something similar (The top left choice) is where it will tell you for sure if it detects the hard drive(s) or not. It gives a couple of the following choices:

IDE 0 Master: (These are your 2 regular IDE ports)
IDE 0 Slave:
IDE 1 Master:
IDE 1 Slave:
IDE Channel 1: (This is where your four SATA ports start)
IDE Channel 2:
IDE Channel 3:
IDE Channel 4:

I'm doing this from memory at work so please forgive me if the actual names are wrong, but it is a list extremely similar to that. Below that list somewhere should be your floppy drive as well. Could you go into this screen and tell me what is there?

If there is nothing there at all, then it is likely the board is bad. If there are things in the regular IDE ports, but not the SATA, it is possible the SATA controler on the board is bad, or it could be whatever SATA device you are trying to connect.

Let me know what you see here and we will go from there.

 

[goliath443]

Well thanx for the input on this topic, but I already boxed the thing up. I plan on getting the Abit KN8 Ultra. Heard anything bad about it?