M3N72-D SATA AHCI woes

[carrot]

I just bought a new 1 TB WD Caviar Black to replace my older 300 GB Seagate IDE drive. I have an Asus M3N72-D motherboard, and I'm having some problems getting my drives to work. I have 3 other SATA drives (total of 4) and a SATA DVD burner. This is presenting a problem because the motherboard only has 4 "standard" SATA ports. From what I understand, ports 1-4 can run in either IDE, AHCI, or RAID mode. Because I have a SATA DVD burner hooked up, I have to leave them in IDE mode. (I think...?) In the manual for the motherboard, it says that SATA ports 5 and 6 only work in AHCI mode. I want to know if that means I have to set ports 1-4 in AHCI mode before they'll work, or if I can run ports 1-4 in IDE mode and ports 5 and 6 in AHCI mode.
I plugged in the new drive and powered up, and nothing is showing up. Am I missing drivers?

Thanks!

P.S. It's Windows XP Pro SP3 x86

[mjc]

Didn't show up where? Windows? BIOS? Both?

[carrot]

Didn't show up where? Windows? BIOS? Both?

It didn't show up in either windows, or BIOS. But the weird thing is that in the BIOS, it only shows the primary and secondary IDE, and the first 4 SATA ports. It doesn't say anything at all about the problematic 5th and 6th ones.

Thanks for the reply!

[Paul Komski]

IDE mode just makes things easier since no special AHCI/SATA drivers need to have been configured.

Since this is presumably a data drive then if it doesn't show up in Device Manager and there are problem devices there with yellow exclamation marks you should just need to supply the drivers from within windows. After that, the partitions wont show, of course, until the drive has been partitioned and formatted using Disk Managment.

[carrot]

IDE mode just makes things easier since no special AHCI/SATA drivers need to have been configured.


Oh how I agree with you!
My motherboard has 6 SATA ports, and I actually wanted to use them all. Ha! Silly me! I found out that, at least with this BIOS, you can't set whether each SATA port operates in IDE/AHCI/RAID mode independently of the others. It's all or nothing. And if you leave it at the default IDE mode, ports 5 and 6 are completely disabled. Ugh. I tried installing windows with the F6 floppy method, but that was just one problem after another.
Eventually I just broke down and bought a PCIE add in card to give myself two more NORMAL(!) SATA ports.

Thanks for the help guys! I feel honored to have been helped by two of the Masters in the same thread.

[jlreich]

Eventually I just broke down and bought a PCIE add in card to give myself two more NORMAL(!) SATA ports.
Nice easy painless solution. :)

I was using AHCI for some time when I had nothing but two Seagate drives and IDE DVD drives and never had any problems. Once I introduced a Samsung drive things started getting flaky. I thought the Samsung was bad, so I bought a new Hitachi drive but the same things started happening, the system would freeze while trying to detect the non-Seagate drive no matter what port it is was in. As long as I had only the Seagate drives all was well. It would seem Seagate has it down but others do not.

So I have been running IDE mode ever since and all is well. :)

[carrot]

@jlreich What OS were you running, just out of curiosity?

[jlreich]

Right now my main OS is Ultimate Edition 2.2 (Ubuntu 9.04, see my sig). I also run vista HP 64bit for gaming. I also have XP but haven't booted to it since last year. Jeez, I really need to boot XP into safe mode and update the video drivers since I switched from an nVidia to an ATI card, not to mention a new CPU... XP is going to be all confused. :p

Anyway, at the time I was running with AHCI I had XP32/Vista HP64/Suse64. Running XP for the first few months until I got vista then pretty much for a year or so I ran vista almost exclusively until I moved to UE a few months ago.

None of the OS's gave me any problem with AHCI, and when I changed back to IDE mode there were no problems. In fact as part of the troubleshooting I switched back and forth several times to determine that it was indeed a problem with the non-Seagate drive and AHCI. Unfortunately it's not so easy when you install with IDE mode and then move to AHCI because the drivers were not present during windows install when you reboot windows it can't find the boot files. There may be a work around for this but I am not sure how to go about it.

Hmm, actually now that I think about it I did have some issues with vista and AHCI but I don't remember exactly what the deal was. I think it was user fault honestly. :o There is a thread I started about it around here somewhere.

[Paul Komski]

Unfortunately it's not so easy when you install with IDE mode and then move to AHCI because the drivers were not present during windows install when you reboot windows it can't find the boot files. There may be a work around for this but I am not sure how to go about it.Theoretically anyway, if the drive in question was reverted to IDE and another slot could be configured for AHCI and a drive attached to it then Device Manager should show a problem device for which you could upgrade the SATA drivers. Once installed that way they should be available for swapping the boot drive from IDE to AHCI. A repair installation with the drivers included by the F6 option should be a long-winded but definitive fix.

[jlreich]

Theoretically anyway, if the drive in question was reverted to IDE and another slot could be configured for AHCI and a drive attached to it then Device Manager should show a problem device for which you could upgrade the SATA drivers. Once installed that way they should be available for swapping the boot drive from IDE to AHCI.
Interesting. You would likely need to have a drive attached this way or trying to install the drivers might just yield an error and quit the install. Though it depends on the driver package. If the AHCI drivers are part of the raid drivers I have installed them once the OS was up and running without having an array before. If you can get the drivers installed you may be able to do a fixboot or in the case of vista use the install disks startup repair option.

It is also interesting to note that when I installed Suse 11 back then there were no drivers needed.

One thing I have to say I didn't like about AHCI is it added about 10 seconds to the boot time due to AHCI detecting everything after POST. If it really made a noticeable difference in read/write times this would be easily tolerable but to be honest I couldn't tell any difference when I went back to IDE mode. In fact I ran windows performance index in vista and the hard drive score actually went up by 0.1 after disabling AHCI. Not that I give that scoring system much credence but it is worth noting.

[Paul Komski]

you may be able to do a fixbootI doubt that would do anything useful; all fixboot does is to rewrite the system (or other specifically defined) partition boot sector. It's the command one would use to overwrite a boot sector virus lodged into a partition boot sector or where the sector has been corrupted. I have never seen it report that it had fixed a wrotten sector till last week when someone bought me a PC blue-screening with an unmountable boot volume message. Safe Mode and Last Known good were no use but fixboot fixed it. There were also some file system errors so its hard to know what had caused the problem.

The real value of AHCI has yet to be demonstrated as far as I have been able to discern. Hot swapping has never really been enabled as far as I can tell on domestic systems and do NCQ etc provide any real benefits? Maybe the next generation of SATA drives and their controllers will be different but I think it is an over-egged development so far.

My earlier reply was tempered as theoretical by the fact that going from IDE to AHCI can cause instability. If AHCI is to be used it is recommended that it should be configured prior to installation (http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-015988.htm).