Asus A7v600 / Seagate SATA drive problem

[somalade]

Hi

I have an Asus A7v600 motherboard which I've been running with 2 x IDE hard drives - one system and one data drive. I wanted to replace the data drive and thought I'd go for SATA so recently purchased a Seagate Baracuda 7200.12 1TB drive. Have tried installing it - plugged in the power cable and the SATA cable and it won't recognise it. I've tried installing the raid driver too, and now when I power on the machine it comes up with this message on startup:

"VIA technologies, Inc.VIA VT8237 Serial ATA RAID BIOS Setting Utilitu V2.01
Copyright (C) VIA Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Scan Devices, Please wait...
Press < Tab > Key into User Window!

Hardware Initiate Failed, Please Check Device!!!
The Bios does not be installed, Press <g> to continue!"

If I press <g> it will load up into windows OK, but no sign of the new drive.

I've done a bit or research to try and find out what the problem is. Here are a couple of possibilities:
1. Do I need to Update the bios. I think I'm still running the original version.
2. Does this motherboard allow just one SATA drive? Reading about RAID in the manual, it looks like 2 drives might be required - Am I able to not run RAID but still run an SATA drive?

Any ideas, please let me know.

____________________
Asus A7v600
40GB Seagate IDE Drive - System
100GB Seagate IDE Drive - Data
Windows XP SP2
1TB Seagate SATA Drive

[mmettin]

Originally Posted by somalade

Hi

I have an Asus A7v600 motherboard which I've been running with 2 x IDE hard drives - one system and one data drive. I wanted to replace the data drive and thought I'd go for SATA so recently purchased a Seagate Baracuda 7200.12 1TB drive. Have tried installing it - plugged in the power cable and the SATA cable and it won't recognise it. I've tried installing the raid driver too, and now when I power on the machine it comes up with this message on startup:

"VIA technologies, Inc.VIA VT8237 Serial ATA RAID BIOS Setting Utilitu V2.01
Copyright (C) VIA Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Scan Devices, Please wait...
Press < Tab > Key into User Window!

Hardware Initiate Failed, Please Check Device!!!
The Bios does not be installed, Press <g> to continue!"

If I press <g> it will load up into windows OK, but no sign of the new drive.

I've done a bit or research to try and find out what the problem is. Here are a couple of possibilities:
1. Do I need to Update the bios. I think I'm still running the original version.
2. Does this motherboard allow just one SATA drive? Reading about RAID in the manual, it looks like 2 drives might be required - Am I able to not run RAID but still run an SATA drive?

Any ideas, please let me know.

____________________
Asus A7v600
40GB Seagate IDE Drive - System
100GB Seagate IDE Drive - Data
Windows XP SP2
1TB Seagate SATA Drive

have you gone into computer management/disk management and formatted the drive yet?

[somalade]

Originally Posted by mmettin

have you gone into computer management/disk management and formatted the drive yet?

I've had a look in computer management / Disk Management, and also under device manager and only the two IDE disk drives are listed. Same with Explorer. Also in device manager I see that under SCSI ad RAID Contollers, the VIA Serial ATA RAID controller is listed as 'Device cannot start'. Not sure why, but perhaps this needs two SATA drives to start..

Anyway, the new drive isn't showing up anywhere so can't format it.

[somalade]

OK.. have managed to get things working. Turns out the problem was due to the speed of the new drive. The motherboard doesn't support a transfer rate of 3GBit/s. So the solution was to put a jumper on the drive to limit the rate to 1.5 GBit/s... refer p28 of the manual...

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/s...100529369b.pdf

Then I was able to see the disk in Computer Management / Disk manager and format from there...

[SteveW]

Glad you got it fixed. I was setting here warming up brain cells to try and assist. It's been a while since I ran the A7V600. I have a small print/file server I use that has a A7V880 board in it wth XP-3200.

I've ran the A7V's with lots of drives and RAID and what-have-you in the past. In fact, the A7V880 has an array or two in it.

Anyway, you got it