Abit AV8 3rd Eye - BIOS does not detect SATA drive

My second computer runs with the following

Abit AV8 3rd Eye (VIA K8T800pro/VT8237)
Athlon 64 3200+
2Gb Apacer RAM
GeForce 7800gt (AGP)

My old IDE HD went kaput so I went out and bought the Hitachi P7K500 sata drive.

To start, I DO NOT wish to establish a RAID. I only wish to run a single SATA drive.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of problems with the chipset on this board and sata, and very few answers. I thought I'd come and take a stab in the dark.

When I go into the BIOS, my new drive is not detected. I have seen forum posts before that said sata drivers need to be installed for this motherboard in order for sata drives to be detected. However, it seems that the driver is just for sata raid (which I do not want or need). There are no clear settings (at least to me) in the BIOS that would be responsible for making the drive appear.

I had read that there was a utility for the Hitachi deskstar HDs that would allow you to change the data transfer from 300 to 150mb/s, since that is all my motherboard will work at (150). However this utility does not detect the drive either. I had used a Seagate Barracuda SATA drive previously as a secondary storage drive and, interestingly, I was able to activate it through Disk Management in Windows but it never did appear in BIOS. My problem, at present, is that I have to install windows on the SATA drive.

So, my goals are as follows:

1. Get BIOS to recognize the sata drive.
2. Install Windows XP on the sata drive.

FYI, the BIOS has been updated to the most recent version.

Well, actually I am trying to install Windows on that drive. The detection of the old Seagate (250GB) sata drive was not a problem since windows was already installed and I was able to activate the HD via Disk Management.

My problem is that when I try to install Windows on the new drive it does not get detected during the windows setup program. I tried using nlite to add the SATA driver to the windows installation disk but that did not seem to help. I pulled an old floppy drive out of a relic that has been sitting in my basement and tried to install the SATA driver using the 3.5 floppy that came with the mobo but I got an error "file txtsetup.oem caused an unexpected error (1024). I tried switching the sata cable as well.

I have not cleared CMOS at all so I suppose I could try that.

Thanks for your reply, and given that I am not just using the drive as secondary storage, do you have any other ideas?

Hmmm. That's interesting. I am fairly sure that in all of my testing/retesting I have done a warm boot and still not been able to find the drive.

I cleared the cmos as well and that did not have any effect.

I echo the sentiments of many, many others who have posted in many forums regarding this similar issue; VIA sucks.

If your drive seems to be working then you are far better off than I was.

I forgot to post back here to indicate that I had finally solved my riddle.

It was simply a matter of switching my new drive to SATA 1.5 on my other computer (that was able to detect SATA in the BIOS. Then I saved the newest SATA drivers to disk and all was well during the fresh installation of windows. Pain in the butt though. I had to go out to my van, where I had just put an old, old computer (a 486, yikes) for taking to the dump and steal the a\: drive out of it, hoping that it would somehow work still.

Anyway, hope your drive works well for you.

I appreciate your specific situation, but it sounded as if someone else (plus others who have posted elsewhere...if my old, fading memory still serves me may have been having similar problems. I'm glad yours worked out.

As a comment to the posting above regarding the SATA drive having no place to show up in the BIOS listing....as a point of interest, in my BIOS one would think the same thing. However, once I had the drive installed and basically working, my BIOS showed 2 new listings (in addition to the other 4 IDE devices..2 HDDs, 1 DVD Player, 1 CD-RW): IDE 0 Master (where my Hitachi HDD was installed) and IDE 0 Slave. Also, my BIOS has a place where I can specify the priority of which device to use for bootup. Included on the list is the new Hitachi SATA HDD. I guess if my new drive never showed up in the BIOS, the BIOS would not give me that option as a boot up device.

For me, as I expected, the shortest distance between 2 points is rarely ever a straight line

I'm not really having any serious problems, but it seems that having installed the SATA drive has caused my system performance to take a pretty good hit. Not sure why that is. I've checked for the latest SATA drivers for the VIA chip and I must have installed that somewhere along the way (prob'ly expecting to move to SATA).

I did a simple file transfer test just to see if the drive would wiggle. The file went from a PATA drive to the SATA drive. It was 3.3GB and it took a minimum of 25 mins (maybe 2.5MByte/sec)!! I then did a transfer of this same file from partition to partition on the same SATA drive. Time was 2 mins. max. Then as a last test, I transferred this same file to a Fedora box I have connected on the same network (100MB). It took about the same amount of time (actually less) than my 1st test (PATA to SATA). I did use Hitachi Features Tool to set the drive to the 1.5GB limit hoping that might help. Nothing apparent in performance. It's not clear to me what's going on, but I am certainly open to ideas and suggestions.

A piece of info I wanted to add: In looking at task manager, I noticed something kinda funky. At the bottom of the window where the CPU Usage is shown, there have been times when this number shows 30-50%. But when I look at the list of processes, systemidle shows 90+% meaning nothing else is really running. Don't remember seeing that before I installed the new SATA HDD. I suppose it's possible I picked up a virus somewhere along the way....but the odds of that are low.

I have yet to clone my WinXP drive onto this SATA (ultimate goal) because a) I'm concerned about performance and b) I'm still trying to figure how to do that. Tried using Maxtor/Seagate's MaxBlast, but it seems to hang at some point along the way (prob'ly because if the destination isn't a Maxtor/Seagate drive, it may not know what to do with it). Looking into Clone-Zilla, but Linux is something with which I'm still trying to get familiar. Open to suggestions on this, as well.

I'll continue to keep this forum posted on my progress in case my trials and travails can be of help.

Cheers...Steph

Hi,

I realized I never got back to provide a response to this posting (couldn't keep track of where I posted for some help

Turns out my problem had nothing to do with the Hitachi drive. I discovered one of my other drives (Maxtor 200GB) was acting up. Once I removed that from the system, everything functioned as expected (~150MB/Sec to/from the Hitachi drive).

I'm not sure if this helps you at all, but good luck.

Cheers....Steph