Drive is Detected Roughly every 3rd Time

**The_Silent_One_1** · March 12th, 2005, 06:52 AM

I recently upgraded to a Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI and 3 Diamond Max 10 300GB SATA HDD's with NCQ. It took a biut of figuring, but I got it configured the way I wanted it, and installed Windows. However, roughly every 3rd time or so the Bios takes longer to Post and it fails to detect a hard drive. At this point I'm leaning towards thinking that the Serial ATA Controller that I'm using on the board is defective. I checked and re-checked the bios. Gigabyte has F1, F4, and F6 available. I went back to F4... no change. I tried the second drive... no apparent change.

**NooNoo** · March 12th, 2005, 07:37 AM

Did you replace the cables when you swapped out the drive?

**The_Silent_One_1** · March 12th, 2005, 02:11 PM

Brand New SATA2 Cables with the catch mechanism that came with the drive.

**The_Silent_One_1** · March 12th, 2005, 02:56 PM

Had same problem with 2 different identical drives using 2 separate cables on 2 separate channels. At this point however, problem appears to be power-related. I changed from the native SATA Power Cables to LP4 to SATA Adapters. They felt quite a bit tighter, and I haven't had any problems since. I am running an Antec TruePower 550W

**The_Silent_One_1** · March 12th, 2005, 04:11 PM

Having thought that I had"solved" the problem. I proceeded to hook up other drives and change from bios F4 to F6. I then ran into trouble detecting drive 2 or drive 3. Sometimes it failed to finnish posting. I am now back to Bios F4. So far so good, but I haven't tested it much yet. Hope this info is helpful to someone else.

**Platypus** · March 12th, 2005, 05:52 PM

If the BIOS has a Quick POST option it can be helpful in diagnosis to turn this option off. If the F6 BIOS is trying to be too quick, the drives or drive/controller combination might not ID quickly enough. The standard POST does many more re-tries to ID a device.

**confus-ed** · March 13th, 2005, 05:56 AM

Originally Posted by Platypus

.. If the F6 BIOS is trying to be too quick, the drives or drive/controller combination might not ID quickly enough. The standard POST does many more re-tries to ID a device.

My current understanding of this, is that bios can only see the controller in the same way it can see a scsi chain - but faster timings may cause conflicts between buses.

What do 'f1' 'f4' & 'f6' mean in this context (when talking about bios settings) ? I'm assuming f6 is fast & f4 is what ? 'safe' ? or is that 'f1'

?

**Platypus** · March 13th, 2005, 08:18 AM

Originally Posted by confus-ed

What do 'f1' 'f4' & 'f6' mean in this context?

They're the BIOS versions, F6 being the latest release, which I gather only gives any benefit when using dual-core SLI video.

I can't say for sure if the Fast Post trick still works the same way, traditionally Fast Post issued I think only two ID requests to a device, if one was a bit slow getting itself into gear it could be missed. Regular POST could issue up to (if I remember right what I read somewhere) seven requests before passing on to the next device. Some BIOS provided a selectable run-up delay as an alternative way of handling sluggish hard drives.

My thought with the F6 BIOS maybe being "too fast" was that quick boot-up time is valued, and maybe they'd tried to reduce the time-out period too much in the F6, as Silent seemed to be getting better results with the F4.