SATA driver fails, ASUS A7V600-X

Dear all,

I have an ASUS A7V600-X board with Award Bios (updated to the latest
available version), and with VT8377/VT8237 North- and Southbridge.

Now I would like to use a SATA II harddrive. It is a Hitachi 500 GB
drive: HI T7K500 500 SA. I know that VT8237 may have problems with SATA
II. But at the moment, even windows XP is not correctly starting the VIA
Raid/SCSI device. I have tried to install different versions of the
corresponding VIA drivers for VT8237. But in Windows device manager, I
see that it is not started but failed. In the readme.txt of the driver,
I found in a folder BIOS two rom files (e.g. 6420R230.rom), and a note
that it is a SATA RAID BIOS. Later it in this file I found

"Make sure VT6420 BIOS is executed by the system BIOS when POST."

But I don't know (1) how to check that this BIOS is executed and if
not, (2) how to tell the BIOS that it should execute this.

Moreover, in the BIOS I cannot find any settings releated to the
onboard SATA interface.

Does anyone have an idea, how I can get access to the SATA II drive?

Thank you very!
Best regards
Pucicu


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wrote:
On Saturday, September 19, 2009 7:09:55 PM UTC-4, pucicu wrote:
By reading the initial posting it should be clear what I'm talking
about. The several posters which have given me some hints obviously have
understood my problem - and I appreciate very much much their time and
effort to try to help me.


pucicu
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It's a rather old thread but it might find useful for people
searching online and looking for a solution.

I was able to install Windows XP on that motherboard by using
a jumper to force the hard drive to operate at 1.5Gps instead of
the 3Gps for newer hard drives.

See the thread here :

http://superuser.com/questions/11353...ital-hard-disk

That worked a few years ago and now I changed the hard drive for
another one, transfer the jumper over and it was detected in the
bios (actually it shows the hard disk after the BIOS POST under the
raid management, you can use TAB to show the options and manage raid
drives). Sadly even after slipstreaming the appropriate drivers (as far
as I know at least) using nLite, Windows XP would refuse to see the
drive. I finally ended up install Windows 7 on it, it's not going to be
fast but at least it works. No special drivers required on Windows 7,
everything was detected correctly when using the 1.5gbs jumper on a
500Gb Seagate drive.

Good luck to all.

Check the label on the drive. It could be a
SATA III drive, and using the jumper makes it
a SATA II drive. See if there is any documentation
for the drive, to verify what the jumper does.

Older drives are SATA II, and using the jumper makes
them SATA I.

The problem is supposed to be a negotiation issue.
Chipsets like VT8237, get "stuck" and don't know the
negotiation sequence. Using the jumper, negates the
need for negotiation, by selecting the correct
operating speed right away. But if you jumper
a SATA III drive to SATA II rates, the negotiation
should still fail. As it did with a native SATA II drive.

The VT8237S, used on some Asrock boards, has that
particular bug fixed. Still, when I tested a
SATA III drive on my Asrock SATA II VT8237S motherboard
about a month ago, operation was flaky, and I had to
stop. So now, I just run SATA II drives on there
(without using the jumper). Even with the bug fix, the
VT8237S still isn't perfect.

You could try a third-party add-in controller
board. Problem is, finding something for PCI
bus, that doesn't suck. I would definitely not
recommend a VIA chip, that's for sure. Not after
seeing my VT8237S not work right on SATA. The
cheapest SATA cards, use a VIA chip.

Paul