SATA drive woes

[djd_201]

Figured I would start a new post to help lessen any confusion.

I was just about ready to complete my computer build after much ado, having just a single SATA 1.5 Seagate 80G 7200 setup on SATA primary on my board to start out. I had XP Home on the OS and Norton 2007 with full MS Office. Had tried to set the secondary SATA drive up, a Hitchachi SATA 1.5 7200 RMP a week or so ago but got a weird fuzziness to the monitor, so I quickly shut it down assuming maybe the drive was bad.

Today I proceeded to install the two optical drives on my IDE secondary slot, a Lite-On DVD burner and a Benq DVD/CDRW burner.

Low and behold the fuzzy came back to my monitor on a reboot.

I experimented warily, and only hooked up one optical drive at a time with a slave jumper setting, no fuzzy to the monitor.

Switched opticals, no fuzzy.

Set the OS SATA Seagate up on SATA secondary on the board, with one optical as slave.

No fuzzy

Changed video cards just on a gamble to no avail.

I can't get both opticals running at the same time with one SATA drive OS, only one optical at a time, nor the secondary SATA drive to run with the SATA primary OS at the same time, without a slight fuzzy blurriness to the monitor...please let me know if somehow I have messed up BIOS settings, or set up the drives and board wrong from the start? A bad board maybe? I wouldlike to pursue all options before quitting on the board is all.

I got it sounding like a tornado mixed with hurricane gale force winds, but I figured I got something simple wrong in setting up originally or BIOS.

I made a floppy disk from the ASUS CD and installed the sata drivers from the start, but set up no array since I wsh the drives to work independantly.

got any ideas?

thanks for the tips in advance

[djd_201]

I added this to merely check out any possible problems...

This Seagate SATAI that I have in the primary position on the motherboard, has PIN jumpers on the back, but from what I have read, no jumpers are necessary unless I am restricting its operation from a 300mbps to a 150mbps drive. Is that so? Or do I need a pin jumper xxoo postion to set it up?

[Midknyte]

you don't touch the pins unless you are limiting the drive. there are no "master/slave" jumpers.

that is really weird. I'd guess power supply or motherboard at this point.

[djd_201]

Hmmmmmm...I wouldn't have thought about power supply...thanks

I'll switch one aout and see

I 'did' however get the optical drives working and showing in device manager...but only with one drive connected, the Seagate with the OS.

Went into the BIOS setup

ADVANCED>ONBOARD DEVICE CONFIGURATION>ONBOARD SATA-IDE>IDE

Just selected IDE instead of SATA and that fixed the optical drives...

But still, if I hook the unformatted Hitachi hard drive up, on SATA2 secondary on the board....my fuzzies come back.


BTW

in those BIOS settings there is this one as follows

ADVANCED>ONBOARD DEVICE CONFIGURATION>ONBOARD LAN (enable/disable)
currently set at enabled...

and

ADVANCED>ONBOARD DEVICE CONFIGURATION>ONBOARD LAN BOOT ROM (enable/disable) currently set at disabled

what is this and do I need to set it differently?

thanks in advance

[Midknyte]

boot rom for lan is to let you boot off a network server like PXE. most people don't use it, which is why yours is disabled.

[Sterling_Aug]

The onboard LAN option is currently enabled because you apparently have an onboard NIC.

Is there a network connection on the back of the mobo and do you use it or are you using an add on PCI NIC?

[djd_201]

So far everything has worked out well with your help here...crossing my fingers.
Since I was totally new at setting up a motherboard for SATA drives, most of the trouble was mere inexperience in this category. Thanks for all the patience here, from everyone.

I ended up evaluating that the Hitcachi 80G SATA drive was fried, won't spin up and was part of the problem. I just received, and installed a secondary SATA Seagate SATA 120G and it worked fine with the system.

Setting the BIOS to IDE instead of SATA in ADVANCED settings allowed me to use other drives, including IDE opticals. I would presume if you set up an array, and used SATA optical drives, you would set BIOS to SATA.

The board came with integrated LAN, so yes I changed that to enabled in the BIOS also. I didn't need the LAN BOOT ROM enabled, thanks STERLING_AUG.

Thanks for all the help, all the way through. I apologize for making things confusing sometimes.