maxtor sata w/ asus a7n8x

[myrmidon]

I cant seem to get the damn drive found...

I have updated my bios and read the manual for the board. The manual only lists one jumper for sata and its default is enabled, I have verified that it is still enabled. I have booted from xp and done the f6 thing and installed sata drivers, once windows is done loading its plethora of drivers and the silicon image or whatever sata drivers are installed, it says there are no hdds to install to. I booted off a maxblast cd to run its utitilites and it could find nothing either.

I would swear that when I first got this mobo I disabled a sata search in bios to speed up booting, but for the life of me I cant find any mention of sata or raid in bios now... I was going through a few different mobos then, but it still seems odd. Also I cannot find any mention of sata in the bios section of the manual.

Anyone know anything about this setup? Anyone have any suggestions or directions at all?

p.s. I have absolutely zero sata experience ^_^

[Wobbel]

Wich mobo do you have

the a7nx8 (click)

or the a7nx8 Deluxe (click)

Because if i look at the specs, the a7nx8 doesn't seem to support sata, the deluxe version does.

[myrmidon]

sorry, I have the deluxe version

perhaps should also say I am trying to install windows onto this drive, so it is the only one currently hooked up... and im still lost, heh.

[Pasty901]

My friend has the same board and an sata drive, he found that he could not run the sata drive as a system drive as automatically when other ide drives were attached it would go straight to these and would not boot from the sata, if you are planning to use the sata as a system drive and have other ide's attached this will not work, as for your current problem im not sure, he managed to install windows etc fine in approx 10 mins may i add. I believe he had to flash the bios tho other than that im out of suggestions.

[vernarial]

I have the same motherboard, but I have a Seagate SATA Hard drive. First off, have you run a format of your harddrive? I mean prior to the installation of windows. Get into DOS and type C:/FORMAT. I think thats how it's done.... it's been awhile. You might want to try that. I didn't have any problems with my mobo finding my SATA harddrive. The ASUS people were pretty good for tech support, so you might want to ask them just in case.

[myrmidon]

I have not formatted the drive yet becuase I cannot get anything to find it =/

The asus website is extremely hard to navigate imo, but I have spent a good amount of time on it. The one time I actually asked for help from them (by means of email I believe) they told me to update my bios... which I had told them I already had in my description of the problem... so bah to them, heh.

So I guess for the those persons with the same mobo, are there any settings in bios with regards to sata that I am missing? Did all you other chaps really do is plug the sob in and boot?

Thanks for all the responses thus far ^_^

[vernarial]

Yeah I did. Hmmmm. Make sure that you are connected to the primary SATA connector and not the secondary. Make sure you set your jumpers on your hard drive to primary. The only thing I noticed in my Bios that might help you is in MAIN-> Primary Master-> I had the access mode set to CHS. I didn't enter any of the values, but I can't remember if that helped anything. It seems when you boot using your xp disk, you can get to DOS, and format your hard drive using FDISK.



Ah Hah. I went back through my old e-mail.
Try this out.

Thank you for contacting ASUS Customer Service.

My name is Linus, and I would be assisting you today.
Please decompress raid driver files in attachment into a floppy disk root
directory ,then begin WINXP installation .
When there is a message "Press F6 to install third part SCSI/RAID..."
please press F6 key (2 or 3 times), then insert that floppy disk to
continue , following the installation and press S to specicy the RAID
controller.
If you want boot from sata, please enter BIOS->Advanced->Advanced bios feature,
set First boot device to SCSI.+

Or maybe try this , even though it is from Seagate. It's about the same, but.....

SATA DRIVES AND XP Operating System

You will need a SATA DRIVER for your SATA controller.

The driver may be on a CD or FLOPPY DISK that came with your
MOTHERBOARD or SATA CONTROLLER CARD

If you cannot find the driver, you can get it from the motherboard or
controller card website.

Either way ... the driver must be copied onto a floppy disk
This is the way that XP requires it.

START by putting your XP installation CD in and BOOT from it.

BEGIN the XP installation process and keep your eye on the screen
until you see it prompt you to:

"PRESS THE F6 KEY TO LOAD A DRIVER"

This is when you insert your FLOPPY DISK with the SATA
driver on it ... XP will see the driver and install it.

At this point - XP will be aware that there is a hard drive
attached and you can use either the XP installation program
to PARTITION and FORMAT your hard drive while it installs XP.

[LPDad]

Just a quick Observation/Question:

Have you tried changing the SATA Jumper setting?? I see that you have said that it is enabled, but you never know-- stranger things have happened to me in dealing with all these mobos over the years. I have built 7 systems using these mobos, and each board seems to have it's own set of quirks. If the jumper is not set to enable the SATA then the bios bypasses the SATA altogether. You should be getting a SATA-RAID "scan for drives-Press CRTL-S to set up RAID Controller" immediatly after your memory detection/drive detection bootup screen and PRIOR to Windows starting. if you Enter the RaidSetup screen you should be able to "see" any drive attached to the SATA cables. If you don't then I would suspect a bad SATA cable/connection or a problem with power to that drive..
On my primary computer I have 7 harddrives (of various sizes)connected to this (a7n8x Deluxe) motherboard (I am testing a maxtor EIDE controller card which allows up to 8 devices), and one of my drives is a 160 GB Seagate SATA drive connected to the first SATA port on the mobo

. The SATA drive itself will not register with WinXP until you format it properly...and the easiest way is to boot using MAXBLAST (for maxtor drives) or SEAGATE DRIVETOOLS (for Seagate) and doing the format/partition on the specific drive. After a reboot then your drive should show up properly.

Hope this helps you out, if not then you might be able to get some good help from the www.amdmb.com Asus-specific mobo forums. Whatever the case, let us know what happens. We can all use the knowledge.

[LPDad]

I reread your posts again. As I understand it you do NOT have any other drives attached???
If you want this to be your boot drive then you need to do as vern says and set the bios to:

first boot device = CDROM (or floppy) -- depending on if you have your maxblast on CDROM or Floppy.

Second boot device = SCSI+
Save and exit the bios THEN:

then Boot from your MAXBLAST cd or FLoppy, format and partition your drive (if maxblast cannot see the drive then look for connection problems/power problems on the drive...see above post)

After the format you should then be able to load windows, making sure you install the driver as outlined in Verns previous post.

--am I getting closer to the info you want/need??

[myrmidon]

bah. twas just a matter of having looked at the wrong jumper when checking to make sure sata was enabled... ha. how ridiculous

Thanks for all the help gents. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here (this is what we call foreshadowing, ha).

[LPDad]

No Sweat...bottom line is that things are now working for you.

you are now the resident asus a7n8x expert.

LOL...

[myrmidon]

haha, if only. I have seen this board in nearly all its variations (standard, deluxe, -x) and I think I may have once got it to setup without a hitch... damnable computers!