ASUS A7N8X delux not detecting new 250gig SATA seagate drive

TKG

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Having no luck.
Bios 1008 the latest does not detect SATA drive

SATA jumpers are enabled
Tried both settings on the hard drive 1.5gig/sec and 3gig/sec
Tried both plugs on mobo for SATA cable and have proper power connection.
Used seagate setup disk and through that program the disk is located and formatted.
Through old drive and using hardware manager in xp i see it listed as a devise under hard disks. But it is not viewed through windows explorer(my computer)

Windows xp disk does not detect drive either


Im lost. Bios simply does not see it, so i cannot install windows to it.

Am i missing something???

Im gonna giver another 12hrs of work then return it to get an IDE drive :(

Thanks for any help
 
I had the same problem with a IDE drive. Theres a tool that you can download from Seagate's own website that solves that problem. I can't remember it off hand but I'll be sure to look for it.
 

enforcer22

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The controler on that baord cannot detect the drive becuase it is over 137gigs. I had the same issue as two computers ago that was my setup. What i was told to do was get a controler card which didnt help. Ninja would be talking about a utility that will partition and format that drive and install something to the boot sector of the drive i believe. Once its formatted it should work fine. On a side note i forgot about this incompatability and fdisked the drive once after loosing the cd rom with the partitioning utility so you might want to avoid departitioning your drive afterwords.

Not sure why the bios doesnt see it as it should however. Since someone is playing oblivion on that computer i cant check the bios but the main drives listed in the bios on that board are not sata drives they are the IDE drives.
 

TKG

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Well i think i sort of solved the problem:

-i had to copy SATA raid drivers on to a floppy (we still use those eh?) And with XP disk installed during boot i hit F6 and installed the drivers there. I am not doing RAID or is it a SCSI drive but oh well.
-now windows would install into my new plump 250gig drive. Wow does formating one of these suckers take time!

Now i can see this drive and my old drive in window explorer...

Just for fun i checked the bios and for some reason i see no reverence to the new SATA drive. I did set the boot order to pick SATA/SCSI

Anyway the BIOS is strange but i dont care now that my drive is now up and running


PS: XP sp1 with sp2 disk. hard drive size was not the issue, it would not see any drive at all, when i got to the part about size it took it at full size no problem




PS thanks to this forum as i found the info on F6 and updating drivers there on this board. I would not have had any reason to go in there otherwise
 

ira176

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i had to copy SATA raid drivers on to a floppy (we still use those eh?) And with XP disk installed during boot i hit F6 and installed the drivers there. I am not doing RAID or is it a SCSI drive but oh well.

That is strange, that you still needed to use the raid drivers, but glad to hear you got your drive up and running. I too have the A7N8X DX, but I was installing a raid 0 array, and did not know that you needed to load drivers from a floppy. I took me several hours of trouble shooting and consultation with manuals to get it figured out. Hopefully in the future, a raid array will automatically be detected and easily configured without the use of the floppy drive.
 

drifter_888

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Just curios. If we format the drive (assuming a new drive) and then update the OS will it recognize the rest of the space. Or because the OS starts as SP1 it will never recognize the rest of the drive.
 

TKG

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For clarification: I was not plugged into a Raid controller, On the MOBO there is primary and secondary "SERIAL ATA HEADERS" and just above them jumpers to enable or disable them.

As for the size issue i dont know how it worked out but when i installed my SP1XP disk and it asked to formate and create partitions i simply picked full size 250gig and it did it. I installed the OS and checked MY computer and saw the full single drive. I then installed my SP2 disk.....


Anyway great input.

One more thing.......... My 250gig SEAGATE only shows 232gigs of space... IS this normal? where did my 18gigs go? Back in the day that would have been a killer stand along 18 gig hard drive worth hundreds?? LOL
 
Yeah that is quite normal. A certian amount of space is automatically lost to the OS, although how much depend s on a number of factors. Not only that but,a 250GB is never a 250GB. Its not exactly 250GB. Western Digital just settled a suit against someone that sued them for the misnaming. Actually kind of frivolous when you think of it.
 

TKG

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frivolous yes and no. When u figure i lost 18gigs. Thats 30% of my 60 gig drive i replaced. And when u consider 18 gigs is actually usefull space. If it were a gig or 2 maybe or lets be generous and say +/-10 gigs nearly 20gigs is alot of missing paid for space? No?


Im not ranting or bitching just saying its not really frivolous.

It would be like buying a 250hp car and later finding out it actually only has 232hp..... Im sure that lawsuit would be back by everyone! :)

Anyway thanks guys!
 

SomeJoe7777

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frivolous yes and no. When u figure i lost 18gigs. Thats 30% of my 60 gig drive i replaced. And when u consider 18 gigs is actually usefull space. If it were a gig or 2 maybe or lets be generous and say +/-10 gigs nearly 20gigs is alot of missing paid for space? No?

There is no lost space.

This is a difference in the interpretation of what "Giga" means. Hard drive manufacturers use the definition that Giga means 1,000,000,000. (10^9). Windows uses the definition that Giga means 1,073,741,824. (2^30).

You bought (and received) 250,000,000,000 bytes of hard drive space. Using the hard drive manufacturer's definition of Giga, that's 250 GB. Using Windows definition of Giga, that's 232.8 GB.

So you didn't "lose" anything. It's just a matter of how the space is reported. You bought (and have) 250,000,000,000 bytes of space, period.
 

Zorak

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The fact that there is no 'lost space' is really only technically true: yes you may have purchased exactly 250 billion bytes as advertised, but since the term 'gigabyte' was used you should in fact recieve the 268435456000 byte space indicated by that term. Since everything in computers deals with powers of two, it really isn't fair for the hard drive manufacturers to use alternate terminology than the rest of the industry. Why should we tolerate that discrepancy in terminology with hard drives when we don't have to tolerate it with RAM? For example, if you have 1 GB RAM installed on your system, when it turns on, the POST will display 1,048,576KB and NOT 1,000,000KB.

I just think that there should be some consistency here.

-Zorak

P.S. To the originator of this thread: I also have a A7N8X Deluxe and I did originally have some problems detecting it. Ultimately I think I had a loose cable or something, but I have never had a problem with detection on that board ever since.
 

SomeJoe7777

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It's not just "technically true" ... it's actually true. There is no lost space. No question.

If you bought a drive that claims to be 250 GB, yes, you would assume they're reporting their drive capacity the same way as your OS, but the fine print on the box states that they aren't. So they aren't misleading anyone.

As far as consistency, there is no law stating that any manufacturer, industry, or otherwise has to obey any standard. They can do whatever they want, as long as it's stated (and it is, in the fine print of the hard drive manufacturer's write-ups on their products, that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes).

Further, if you really want to get picky, the SI (System International) system of units defines worldwide standards for what all the prefixes mean. The SI definition of Giga is 1,000,000,000. So really, the hard drive manufacturers are following the standard to the letter, it's the computer/OS/memory manufacturers who have "taken liberty" with the definition.

For that matter, there is no longer any reason why computers must report hard drive space in powers of 2. It used to be that the calculations were easily done in assembly, but those days are gone. Windows Explorer could easily be reprogrammed to report drive and file sizes using powers of 10 (or even allow an option to switch between the two) very easily.

As to why the hard drive & computer/OS manufacturers aren't consistent, that was decided years ago. Hard drive manufacturers used to use powers of 2 to be consistent with the rest of the computer terminology. Around the time that manufacturer A put out an 8.4 GB hard drive (9,000,000,000 bytes and reported using powers of 2), manufacturer B put out the same size drive but decided to switch their definition for marketing purposes. Thus manufacturer B's 9 GB drive (9,000,000,000 bytes reported using powers of 10) sat on the shelf next to manufacturer A's 8.4 GB drive, and manufacturer B's drive looks larger. Soon afterwards, all hard drive manufacturers switched to powers of 10 to be competitive.

And on a final note, the SI units that I was talking about earlier have recently been amended to include prefixes that specifically refer to powers of 2 rather than powers of 10. Ki, Mi, and Gi represent multipliers of 1024, 1048576, and 1073741824 respectively, as opposed to the standard K, M, and G which represent multiplers of 1000, 1000000, and 1000000000. Thus you can now remove the confusion and report the drive size as 250 GB or 232 GiB for the same 250,000,000,000 byte drive.
 

drifter_888

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I know I'm ignorent in this but where do you guys find the time for this type of informaiton and detail. i am very impressed in the amount of research and clear thought that went into the detail of this discussion of GB and GiB (didn't even know the latter existed) and I only assumed the theory never really calculated it out.
 

Zorak

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SomeJoe7777, I do believe you are putting forth a well formed argument, and like we both said, when you get a 250GB drive you are in fact recieving 250billion bytes of space, but still, I respectfully disagree with you. I am perfectly well aware about the SI prefixes and i know that it is computers that have redefined them. All I am saying is that, why is there no consistency? And please don't tell me that the manufacturers can do whatever they want; that is really truism since of course they can do anything as long as they aren't killing anyone. I just think there should be some logic in the way hard drive manufacturer marketing does things, and to retort that their marketing departments are using logic is to acknowledge that they are willfully decieving their customers. What I mean by this is that if they choose to go against conventions established in the early days of computing since it would suit them better (by sounding like a lot of space), they are taking advantage of the fact that customers think they are buying 250GiB rather than 250GB.

I hope I am communicating my point correctly, but just in case here is the short version: either they made a switch in notation against conventions for no apparent reason, or they did it for a devious reason to garner more money.

Ultimately I think either the RAM manufacturers should start selling RAM in powers of 10 or change the way they advertise to match the hard drive industry or the hard drive industry should change to match that of RAM. I suppose to me, consistency just makes more logical sense than arbitrary marketing notations.

To drifter_888: I wouldn't say it is so much a matter of time spent researching all of this before posting as it is a matter of background experience. I have been learning about computers for quite some time now, and I am studying to be a computer engineer, so the 10 minutes I took to write my first post was really drawing on my background experience rather than doing a whole lot of research. And as for the calculations, if you know the theory, the calculation takes all of 5 seconds to perform, copy, and paste.

But now we are hopelessly off topic without a chance of steering back on course, so I will jump this ship before it sinks. Have a nice day, gentlemen!

-Zorak
 

alpha_channel

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I've the exact same mobo and I added a 250Gb SATA (my second Seagate) and it was a simple case of hooking it up and using Seagates software to format it, the OS (win XP sp2) mounted it as my G: drive and away it went.

I've always accepted the whole apparently loosing a bit of storage (it's not as if I've ever completely filled a hard drive) since the Amiga (now there was a hard drive problem - the first one self destructed as soon as it was plugged in -4.5GB- and the second one, a Western Digital -still working after thirteen years-, came with 250MB of bad sector, and don't even get me started on installing the ah heck. Easier than a cd drive mind :) ).

There was an article in a weekly computer mag (Micro Mart) that I 've been buying for years explaining why the drive manufacturers gave one size and the OS reported another. I think, if my memory serves me, that one of the conclusions they came up with had to do with marketing, which makes a bit of sense when you look at it. Which would you rather see plastered on a box - The new whiz bang 232.8 GB hard drive, bigger size, faster access! or The new whiz bang 250GB hard drive, bigger size, faster access!.

Marketing people seem to love nice round numbers when it comes to advertising the size of things while the opposite is true when it comes to price hence £63.99/£63.95 instead of £64, the one penny difference is physiologically important and makes people think, on a subconcious level, that they are buying a something that bit cheaper (had to study marketing during various design courses :wink: ).