Clear cmos, dead sata?

[nomadktf]

Hello,

Just finished building a system for my brother in law, everything was going swimmingly until a few hours ago. Everything was fine, the system booted up without a hitch, got windows 7 installed, as well as a nice set of software suites- all updated drivers for all of the components.. the works. I left the system running in the other room for about thirty min.When we went back the screen was black. We took the case into my living room took it apart and found out through troubleshooting that the GFX card (a used 9800GT i had laying around)was not displaying video at all, so we assumed that because of its age the card may have just kicked it. Since I had already disabled the onboard video in CMOS, I had to reset it in order to get it up again so he could at least use the PC with on board video for the time being. Video came back on as intended via the oinboard GFX, but Now all of a sudden, none of his sata ports are picking up any of the drives- IDK what to do I've tried everything except RMAing the board.

My bios settings are:
SATA operational mode set to IDE mode
All six ports are set to auto detect.
The boot device priority options are limited because the BIOS doesn't think there are any drives connected to the sata, so I cannot set HDd or DVDROM to their proper boot priority... However all six of the sata ports still show up in the bios.

I've tried different Sata cables and different combinations of ports but to no avail. I know the HDD and the DVDBurner aren't faulty because I tested them in another machine.

Is it possible that resetting CMOS changed some setting I am just overlooking, or I perhaps need to completely re flash the bios?

Also- the bios properly displays the cPU, memory and USB ports so I know that part of the board isn't faulty.

Specs:
ASRock 880G-LE Mainboard

Patriot Gamer 2 Series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600

ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner

AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz Socket AM3 95W

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX 2TB SATA 6.0Gb/s

Diablotek PHD Series PHD550 550W ATX12V V2.2 Power Supply

(There was originally a NVIDIA 9800GT in there too, but it was removed)

 

[o1die]

Try changing the bios sata setting to "achi" if that's what you originally used to install windows.

 

[nomadktf]

I did try that still, nada.

 

[totalknowledge]

I always try and do a clear, before installing. This one doesn't make a whole lot of sense though.

Did you try clearing the CMOS again? Leave the jumper open longer, and see if maybe it got only half cleared or something.

Will it boot off of a usb drive?

 

[jdenova007]

I wonder if your SATA controller is shot.... Can you try resetting the CMOS again... or maybe even a BIOS update? If these don't make a change, just RMA the board. You could be troubleshooting something that is out of your control(like a faulty SATA controller) and you will be wasting time trying to fix it.

 

[nomadktf]

more than likely the sata controller is shot. as this morning i tried a bios flash to the newest bios (the 1.70) for the board he has and still, no sata support. The six ports show up in the bios as "no device connected". Thanx for the help, looks like time to RMA away.