Serial ATA Problems

[Dinjo]

I recently bought a Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra Mobo and a 120Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA V Hard Drive.I set it up with a AthlonXP 2000+, a 64Mb Ge-Force 440 graphics card, 256 of PC2700 DDR Ram,Lite-on 52X Cd-rom and standard floppy drive +350W PSU. I installed Win98 SE and everything was fine until I installed the SataLink driver from the M/Board CD. It needed a restart after installing the driver but it froze during startup and refused to load. I reformatted the C:\ Partition and tried to load Win XP Pro. I copied the SataLink driver to a floppy and specified it when asked by the win XP setup. Once again, the PC needed a restart and promptly froze after the POST.
I tried the installation using the SataLink add-on card supplied with the Mobo and I also tried direct connection using an adapter cable that I Made to connect to the standard PSU lead . After countless hours working on it, trying various ways to install the OS I still can't get it to accept the SataLink driver. I tried the raid driver also but it didn't make any difference.

I'm just wondering has anyone else come across this problem or does anyone know how to get to install the driver. Any thoughts on the subject will be gratefully appreciated

[lewis]

I don't know anything about SATA but is there maybe an option in the bios that your missing? Do you have the right driver? Usually 98 and XP will not share the same driver.

[Dinjo]

Thanx for the reply

I've been through the Bios settings so many times, I can nearly recite them from memory. There is no option to boot directly from the SATA controller and the only option to auto detect Hdd's is in Standard CMOS Features. This limits autodetect to finding Ide or Cd-rom drives and nothing else. I'll just have to keep trying until I either get it working or someone comes up with the solution.

Dinjo

[Dinjo]

Still no luck with that driver problem. I loaded Win98se on a small IDE drive and then used the Seagate DiskWizard to install the Sata drive. The DiskWizard allows you partition and format the Sata drive and you can copy the entire contents of the boot drive to make the Sata the boot drive. The Sata driver loaded no problem on the IDE drive. As soon as the system was copied to the Sata drive, the PC booted up to "verifying DMI pool data" and that's as far as it would go.
The idea behind copying the system to the Sata drive was to put a good install of 98se on there and then upgrade to XP. I even got the latest version of the Sata drivers but I'm beginning to think that there is a problem with the Sata Drive itself or the SataLink controller chip onboard. I sent details of the problems to the Gigabyte tech team but no reply so far.

I'm going to ring the Seagate customer services team to see if they can shed any light on this issue. I'll let you know if they come up with a solution.

Dinjo

[Comptech]

This is a longshot, but in your boot options in the bios look for boot fron raid, most boards with serial ata also have built in raid functions. If you have that option enabled it should give you the choice to treat it as raid or serial ata. Good luck, Comptech