P5W DH Deluxe with many Harddisk -> Booting Problems

[beebop]

Hi,

I have some boot problems with my new system and hope to find someone who has a hint what's the matter.

Let me first give you an overview of my configuration:

ASUS P5W DH Delux, Bios Rev. 1305
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
2x Corsair ValueSelect DIMM 1024MB PC2-4200U
MSI NX7900GT-VT2D256EZ
Antec P180
Seasonic S12-430

and now in detail the drives:

1st IDE Master: Western Digital WD1600SB-01KBC
1st IDE Slave: Maxtor 4G120J6

2nd IDE Master: Samsung SH-D162C DVD-ROM
2nd IDE Slave: IBM-DTLS-30703

3rd IDE Master: Western Digital WD3200 KS-00PFB SATA (red SATA1 port)
3rd IDE Slave: Samsung SH-W163A SATA DVD+/-RW (black SATA3 port)

I wish the 3rd IDE Master to be the primary booting device which is what I configured in the bios.
While booting the system I observe the following symptoms:
After a while, when the JMicron screen disappears I only get a blinking caret and nothing more.

The only way to startup the newly installed WinXP is by setting the 3rd IDE Slave as primary boot device, insert the WinXP-Disc and _do nothing_ when asked if the system should boot from CD, just wait. Then, after some seconds Windows boots as wished from the 3rd IDE Master.

To be honest there are some other OS's on the other harddisks as they were taken from older machines. Perhaps the boot loader gets confused by about 4 different OS's to choose from, but thats just guessing. I'd like to delete all the MBRs from the disks other than the 3rd IDE Master, but don't know how.

I tried 'fixmbr' using the recovery console, but it hasn't changed anything.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
beebop

 

[illuminatirex]

had the same problem, my advice....dont read the instructions(worked for me) ( btwi have the same hd's as u)

ok here it is:
conect the hd's asu u want slave/master to the black ide conection on same cable, and the optical drives on the other cable, same thing slave/master(set the jumpers right) and conect it to the blue conection, it took me almost 2 days to figure that one out, the bios will not recognize them but dont worry, just go to windows, and then it all works, it is recognized in windows, just not in the bios, but they work fine. my gues id asus messed up the second ide conector the jmicron one, btw u have to have the jmicron boot rom enabled(other options also), and the sata set to ide, the hd will show up as 3rd master/slave and optical drives will not show up, but they will work.(wnt threw this myselfe last tuesday)

hope it helpes, good luck

 

[beebop]

btwi have the same hd's as u

Exactly the same? Unbelievable...

conect the hd's asu u want slave/master to the black ide conection on same cable, and the optical drives on the other cable, same thing slave/master(set the jumpers right) and conect it to the blue conection, it took me almost 2 days to figure that one out, the bios will not recognize them but dont worry, just go to windows, and then it all works, it is recognized in windows, just not in the bios, but they work fine. my gues id asus messed up the second ide conector the jmicron one,

Okay, no problem. So rumors are right that only one of the ide-ports (apparently the black one) can actually handle HD's; likewise the other one only OD's? So I can only connect two HD's at maximum to the board?
Currently I have only one IDE-OD and I wanted to use the spare IDE-port for the IBM HD.

btw u have to have the jmicron boot rom enabled(other options also), and the sata set to ide, the hd will show up as 3rd master/slave and optical drives will not show up, but they will work.(wnt threw this myselfe last tuesday)

hope it helpes, good luck

Does "sata set to ide" mean that the SATA drives will be as slow as IDE drives? Hopefully not, 'cause then the whole SATA thing would be a waste of money.

I'll try this tonight when I'm back from work and give some feedback how it went.

 

[illuminatirex]

HI, actually in the instructions it saiz (atleast for the p5w dh deluxe) that the blue blue one is for the optical d, and the black for the hd, but that does not work, u have to do it the other way around, hd's to blue, optical to black, bios will have issues with it(it wont find the opticals), but windows will work fine without a hich.

 

[beebop]

HI, actually in the instructions it saiz (atleast for the p5w dh deluxe) that the blue blue one is for the optical d, and the black for the hd, but that does not work, u have to do it the other way around, hd's to blue, optical to black, bios will have issues with it(it wont find the opticals), but windows will work fine without a hich.

This was what I had in the first place. I switched it now and attached the HD's to the black IDE-port and the DVD-ROM as well as another HD to the blue port. Then, with JMicron enabled every drive either HD or OD is recognized by the bios.

But there is one drawback: The only possible boot order in which the system correctly boots from the SATA-HD is setting as first boot device the SATA-OD and as second one the SATA-HD. Every other configuration fails and the boot stops with a blinking caret. I figured this out by mere chance when booting manually from the SATA-OD with no WinXP-CD inserted.

However, I'm happy that this whole thing finally works but I'm not quite sure why it does and why only in this configuration.

 

[pgarnold]

beebop,

I have a few suggestions for you to simplify your setup and possibly add a bit of data safety as well. My understanding of how to use the MB in an optimal way:

Throw the IBM disk in the trash after you recover whatever you need from it. The deskstars have one of the worst histories for data loss of just about any drive on the market. If you haven't had data loss on it yet, you will.

Hook up the remaining HDs to the PRI_EIDE (black) connector. Both WD and Maxtor are good quality products. You should get the latest drivers for the JMicron chip, however, that controls this connector. Lots of buggy problems have been reported in trying to use the JMicron and it is the slowest way to make a connection on this motherboard. An alternative to consider would be to get an IDE controller for a slot and connect them to that instead. Buying a new IDE slot adapter will cost about $25.

Buying a new WD 320 GB sata II (same as your present model) would be about $90 and then you can replace your existing old drives with something more reliable and faster that includes such nice features as monitoring the drive to provide early warning of pending failure. After having lost a few HDs in various computer, I value this feature very highly. Put this on the SATA4 port. Also make sure you are using the latest Intel ICH7R south bridge AHCI drivers. This will give you full SATA functionality. You will need to make a change in the Bios Main screen for "ISD Configuration" and set to AHCI. If you didn't do this step when you loaded the OpSys, you will have to reload from scratch. The default is an IDE emulation mode which doesn't give you SATA benefits. The AHCI mode is full SATA capability without being RAID capable.

I have seen a lot of problems with using the JMicron connector documented on the ASUS website. The experts over there just advise people to avoid using it altogether. You have a number of HDs you are trying to connect and that just makes thinks too complicated to bother with at some point. Of course it is easy for me to say for you to spend the money but only you can weigh the hassle of getting this to work properly and weighing the potential data loss from using older HDs.

Good Luck,

Paul

 

[beebop]

beebop,
Throw the IBM disk in the trash after you recover whatever you need from it. The deskstars have one of the worst histories for data loss of just about any drive on the market. If you haven't had data loss on it yet, you will.

Nice. I used this one as primary drive in my old system.

Hook up the remaining HDs to the PRI_EIDE (black) connector. Both WD and Maxtor are good quality products. You should get the latest drivers for the JMicron chip, however, that controls this connector. Lots of buggy problems have been reported in trying to use the JMicron and it is the slowest way to make a connection on this motherboard. An alternative to consider would be to get an IDE controller for a slot and connect them to that instead. Buying a new IDE slot adapter will cost about $25.

The former is what I have done so far.

Buying a new WD 320 GB sata II (same as your present model) would be about $90 and then you can replace your existing old drives with something more reliable and faster that includes such nice features as monitoring the drive to provide early warning of pending failure. After having lost a few HDs in various computer, I value this feature very highly. Put this on the SATA4 port. Also make sure you are using the latest Intel ICH7R south bridge AHCI drivers. This will give you full SATA functionality. You will need to make a change in the Bios Main screen for "ISD Configuration" and set to AHCI. If you didn't do this step when you loaded the OpSys, you will have to reload from scratch. The default is an IDE emulation mode which doesn't give you SATA benefits. The AHCI mode is full SATA capability without being RAID capable.

Your right, another 90 bucks for a new HD wouldn't kill me and perhaps raise data security. Thanks for the hints concerning AHCI. As far as I know one could activate this feature also without reinstalling Windows with some litte registry changes and manual driver installing.

As this whole thing works now I will use this for a while. All valuable files are already on the SATA disk so I can just take the others as trash cans or something. But perhaps, in a few weeks I won't use the old ones at all because SATA is so damn fast compared to them. We'll see.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the advice!
Martin