Asus P5l-mx Sata, Ide, Dvd Burner Problems

[will413]

I bought a Asus P5l-mx motherboard that is supposed be able to use IDE or SATA hard drives. I first hooked up my DVD burner and one hard drive so I could load windows. I have another hard drive of the same but the board did not have IDE2 port. Windows loaded fine but after booting into windows I tried to install all my drivers but I got nothing but errors, ( not a win32 application or I/o error. I did everything I could think of and finely I went into my bios setup and set the DMA and another setting and rebooted and it worked like a charm but I do not understand why I had to manually set it up. I decided to buy two IDE to SATA converters so I could run my hard drives on my SATA ports and my DVD burner on my IDE1 port. My system would not recognize my hard drives connected to the converters. I tried every setting in the book in the bios and the hard drives and tried it on the DVD burner and another hard drive and still the system would but recognize any of the drives connected to the SATA ports. So I decided to go with two hard drives on IDE 1. One hard drive worked find but the other formated in dos but in windows the hard drive does not show up. I run Maxtor Blaster 4 for windows to see if could configure it with the utility but it stated that there was no drive to configure. I tried different cables but that did not work. I have been trying to reach Asus tech support for five and a half days now. I sent three Emails and got no response. I used their live support two time only to be told that no one was available to help me. I have called three times. The third time I waited for their tech support to answer. When someone responded after about 10 minutes I told him what was going on. After I was through he told me he was not a technician even though I called support and he said he would take my number and they would call be back. I am still waiting. Maybe someone in the forum have had a similar problem with Asus motherboards and can help me. Three years ago Asus tech support was the best and I would buy their boards but now they must be having so many problems with their boards that they have to put half the callers on permanent hold. If I can't find any answerers I will assume that the motherboard is defective and send it back for a replacement.

Hard drive Maxtor 6y120 PO
bios updated today to latest
CPU Itel Pentium4 d 3.4
Motherboard P5l-mx

[NUTNDUN]

I have always had good luck with Asus too. Let me do some looking later tonight to see what the layout on the board is exactly and the specs on the hard drives. What windows are you running, xp, 2000? Also noticed about the bios update, were things working before or after the update or did anything change with what was working with the bios update?

[NUTNDUN]

CPU
LGA775 socket for Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo / Pentium® D / Pentium® 4 / Celeron® D Processors
Compatible with Intel® 05B/05A/06 processors
Support Intel® next generation 65nm CPU
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology ready
Chipset
Intel® 945G / ICH7
Front Side Bus
1066 / 800 / 533 MHz
Memory
2 x DIMM, max. 4GB, DDR2 667 / 533 / 400 MHz, non-ECC, un-buffered memory
Dual channel memory architecture
Expansion Slots
1 x PCI-E x16
1 x PCI-E x1
2 x PCI
VGA
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Storage
Southbridge
- 1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33
- 4 x Serial ATA 300/150
LAN
Gb LAN PCIe
Audio
Azalia ADI1986A, 6-channel High-Definition Audio CODEC
Jack-Sensing & Enumeration
S/PDIF out interface
USB
8 x USB2.0 ports (4 ports at mid-board, 4 ports at back panel)
Special Features
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 2
ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall)
ASUS Q-Fan
ASUS EZ Flash
ASUS MyLogo2
Back Panel I/O Ports
1 x PS/2 Keyboard
1 x PS/2 Mouse
1 x VGA
1 x Serial port
1 x Parallel port
1 x RJ45 port
4 x USB 2.0
Audio I/O
Internal I/O Connectors
2 x USB connectors support additional 4 USB ports
1 x Floppy disk drive connector
1 x IDE connector
4 x SATA connectors
CPU/ Chassis Fan connector
Front panel audio connector
1 x S/PDIF Out Header
CD audio in
24-pin ATX Power connector
4-pin ATX 12V Power connector
1 x System Panel connector
BIOS
4 Mb Flash ROM, AMI BIOS, PnP, DMI2.0, WfM2.0, SM BIOS 2.3, ACPI 2.0a, ASUS EZ Flash, ASUS CrashFree BIOS 2, ASUS C.P.R., ASUS MyLogo2
Manageability
WfM 2.0, DMI 2.0, WOL by PME, WOR by PME, PXE
Accessories
1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
1 x FDD cable
1 x SATA Cable Kit (SATA/Power)
1 x I/O Shield
User's manual
Support CD
Drivers
ASUS PC Probe II
ASUS Update
Microsoft directX
Adobe acrobat reader
ASUS Screensaver
Symantec NIS2006
Form Factor
MicroATX Form Factor, 9.6"x 8" (24.5cm x 20.3cm)

There is the specs to the motherboard, it has one ide and 2 SATA connectors, I would get a SATA hard drive to use for the OS and put the second hard drive on the ide cable and the DVD on as slave on the ide channel. I wouldn't trust the converters. Or you could run with the one HD as master on the ide and the DVD as slave until you buy a SATA HD. It is normal to have to change settings in the bios to get things working. Also depends whether you have the jumpers set right on the drives.

[NUTNDUN]

Do you have any info on the converters?

[will413]

I am running windows XP Pro and the everything and is still the same even after two bios updates. I can't help but think that you can not mix old technology with new technology without running into a lot of problems. I don't know if anybody has tried to run two IDE hard drives or Lite-On Dvd burner on this motherboard . Maybe everybody went to SATA and never had the problem.

The Burner works in all my other systems but they are setup with IDE 1 and IDE 2 ports with no SATA ports on board. I stll have not received any help from ASUS. I have tried six times and this is day six.

There is still a problem with the burner even in dos. I tried to run a diagnostic software from the cd and when it started loading the drivers for the cd drive it said their no CD drive to be found and that does not make a lot of sense to me because I was running it from the cd. I have never had that happen on any other computer.

Even with the problem, If I buy a SATA drive and it will work on the SATA port and my other hard drive and CD drive work with a little bit of configuration I will keep the board. Not really crazy about sending it back. But if that does not work the motherboard is going back for a replacement.

I think the motherboard I will buy for my next system will be Gigabyte. Maybe their tech support will not put me on permanent hold.

This is the converter I bought, ( IDE to SATA Flat Converter w/ Red SATA Cable usde06 ). Don't know much them. The dealer said that they should work with the 120 GB hard drive.

[NUTNDUN]

I would avoid the converter, if you don't mind buying a sata drive then do that setup. I love abit motherboards, I have also had good luck with the gigabyte boards also.

[will413]

Thanks for the help. After I get the SATA and install it I will let you know the results.

[Schwinn555]

Looks like I got my ASUS P5L-MX motherboard about the same time as you. I've had better luck then you but it did take a while to sort things out. Like you my hard drives & DVD are ide/ata . I would have been happier with 2 ide buses but knew what I was getting into when I bought it. I wanted the smaller board rather then the full size ATX version which does come with 2 ide buses.The Asus was highly rated by friends and people at another forum though most of them have the ATX version P5L-VM etc. I also got 1 ide to Sata convertor board. It's very small and red and no brand. While I got it to work with my Pioneer 105 DVD RW drive it wouldn't boot to do an install. I did get it to work with one of my hard drives. So I have one hard drive set as master & the DVD drive set as slave on the ide bus. The hard drive used with the convertor must be set to master or master single drive depending on brand. Cable select isn't recommended nor slave. I have it plugged into the red #1 SATA port. The black SATA ports are marked slave. It is easy to go wrong with the drive pins. The hard thing to figure out for me was the bios settings. After much fussing I found that default settings most likely would have worked fine and that doing a bios upgrade was mostly for newer Core2 CPU's which I don't have. Here is the bios area where I went wrong and it's a bit tricky. In your manual it's under 2.3.5 IDE Configuration:
Should be set to the default of First line:Enhanced Mode
next line: S-ATA
any other seting will cause issues for most people as the manual says and it's true. My guess is this is where you went wrong unless the board is defective. I had trouble with this as the setting seems wrong until I read the manual carefully. It's also a bit tricky setting the boot drives. I will likely buy a native SATA drive in the future but the convertor board is working fine . In fact it's a great setup once things are working as expected. Best of luck

[NUTNDUN]

Thats a great first post Schwinn