Funny issue with SATA 150 / 300

Hey guys.

This doesn't really matter anymore, because I just ended upgrading the system, but I was wondering what everyones take on it was.

So, I bought a new 1TB drive for my dad for christmas.

His mobo is SATA150 and the drive is SATA300, but that's fine, right? Well, the 500GB drive I bought him last year was the same, and that worked fine.

Wrong.

Install the drive, go to boot up, and the computer just hangs when it detects the drive. so it'd look something like this:

HD 1 Blah Blah ........................ 500GB
HD2 Blah Blah ......................... ..... . . . . .

Ok, first step, put the jumper on the drive to bring it down to 150GBPS... no effect.
So I treid flashing the BIOS. Given that the last BIOS update for this board was in 2004, it didn't really help much.

I read up on it and apparently there are cases where there can be an incompatability, so Samsung offered this software (it's a samsung HDD) to flash the Drive to make it think it's 150GBPS.
Problem with this is that I couldnt get it to detect the drive so I could flash it.

Anyway after a lot of geeky stuff, I managed to get around it by hot swapping the drive and getting into command prompt. So now it reads the drive. Flashed it... and same problem occurs.

Oh yeah, and if I boot it into windows unplugged, then hot swap it in windows, it works fine and I was able to format it etc. It worked fine in my PC, so I know the drive isn't faulty.

Anyway in the end I just ended up getting a new mobo/RAM/CPU for my dad because was about time he had an upgrade anyway. But still... I wonder... was it just a general incompatability? Pretty wierd problem, eh?

That is odd. What if it were the only drive connected I wonder if that would have made a difference at all?

Yeah pretty wierd eh?

I tried it with everything else unplugged, and in all the different ports with the same effect.

I asked the guys at my local computer store too, and they were stumped.

Its as though that particular model of hard drive is randomly incompatable with this particular motherboard.

It is the motherboard's BIOS that determines the size of the HD attached, since the latest BIOS for this board dates from 2004, it may simply have never been designed to address the drive. The thing to remember too is that older BIOS' had a separate BIOS setup for the SATA/RAID controller, where as now they are integrated into the mainboard BIOS. If the SATA controller is one of the older type then you needed to configure the drives within the SATA BIOS itself (most used ctrl + f or ctrl + s) to access the SATA BIOS, if this is the case if the drive wasn't configured by the BIOS then it would not be recognised.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Artemis

It is the motherboard's BIOS that determines the size of the HD attached, since the latest BIOS for this board dates from 2004, it may simply have never been designed to address the drive. The thing to remember too is that older BIOS' had a separate BIOS setup for the SATA/RAID controller, where as now they are integrated into the mainboard BIOS. If the SATA controller is one of the older type then you needed to configure the drives within the SATA BIOS itself (most used ctrl + f or ctrl + s) to access the SATA BIOS, if this is the case if the drive wasn't configured by the BIOS then it would not be recognised.

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Sounds like what mostly happened. This board was around the first generation of SATA mobos.

I figured buying a SATA PCI controller card would solve the problem, but for £20, just didn't seem worth it. Thus the spending of £250 on new parts... heh :P

You didn't say who the mobo manufacturers were, but I had an Abit mobo from about that time and it too had some very strange antics WRT the SATA controller.

And no matter what I tried I could never get it to work with a SATA 300 drive, even with the jumper set to operate at 150. Finally got rid of it with an IDE drive in a system that I knew would never need be upgraded.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lynx

You didn't say who the mobo manufacturers were, but I had an Abit mobo from about that time and it too had some very strange antics WRT the SATA controller.

And no matter what I tried I could never get it to work with a SATA 300 drive, even with the jumper set to operate at 150. Finally got rid of it with an IDE drive in a system that I knew would never need be upgraded.

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Yay, nice to know I'm not the only one who's encountered the same problem then :cool:

It was an AMD Socket A Gigabyte motherboard, can't remember the model off the top of my head. GA-somethingsomething-Pro2. :yup:

In that case I'm surprised you had problems.

All the Gigabyte GA-7xxxx-Pro2 boards had Si3112a or Si3512 Raid controllers, you shouldn't have had any problems with those.

Alternatively if you had the GA-7VT880-Pro motherboard that had the SATA interface on a VIA 8237 southbridge chip, notorious for these sort of problems and exactly the chip I had on my Abit board.