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Gigabyte board hanging in AHCI controller startup

Tags:
  • Gigabyte
  • NAS / RAID
  • Western Digital
  • Motherboards
Last response: in Motherboards
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Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
November 19, 2008 4:58:16 AM

I have just replaced a faulty ASUS board with a new seemingly faultless gigabyte board. The transition went well but vista needed a reinstall anyway.

Am trying to make a RAID 0 with 2 WD 230GB's ( slightly different models but that should be ok right ? )

Restart the machine
Change the BIOS to RAID then save and restart.

All goes well goes into ;

Serial ATA AHCI BIOS, Version iSrc 1.07 08042006
Copyright blah blah
Controller Bus#00, Device#1F, Function#02: 06 ports, 02 Devices
_ <--eternally blinking cursor


Only the 2 drives I want to Raid are attached
Manual talks of a Ctrl+i cue I should see and a Configuration Utility I should go into. There is nothing there.

Even if I don't want RAID and only SATA enabled for the drives ( set in BIOS ) this screen pops up and won't go any further ( to boot from vista DVD ). My choices in BIOS are IDE/AHCI/RAID.


System:
E6600
4GB RAM
8800GTS 648
GA-EP45-UD3R
2x WD 230GB Drives
2x WD 1TB Drives

Any help really appreciated. Stranded in a foreign country and this computer is my window to home. =)


More about : gigabyte board hanging ahci controller startup

November 19, 2008 5:13:57 AM

? So do you want to do raid or not?
If you want raid - then select raid in bios, else leave it as AHCI.
Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
November 19, 2008 5:47:38 AM

Yes I want raid.

But choosing ahci or raid in my bios end with the ATA AHCI controller hanging after a restart. It detects 2 drives and just hangs there. Blinking. Defiantly.

The only choice I have that works is to set it to disabled which defaults to IDE then loads up the operating system on one of the disks.
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Anonymous
a b V Motherboard
November 19, 2008 7:11:21 AM

Well, after trying almost everything and running tests on the system - everything passes. I paired up different disks to use.

It seems the system disk ( which does not show up as faulty in HD tests ) is causing the problem. AHCI just doesn't like it apparently.

Whoohoo ! what a waster of a day.
a b V Motherboard
November 19, 2008 10:57:34 PM

I have had similar problems with getting a gigabyte board to run in AHCI mode. It is the GA-MA 780G board, which is fairly well documented on the net. It does exactly as you suggested and the only way it will work is if I switch in bios to IDE mode.
I understand that there is a workaround once you boot into windows, but I don't recall the details. Like I said it should be pretty easy to find in any search engine.
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