A7N8X-E Deluxe SATA "Device not Detected, utility disabled"

[B. Ruiz, Jr.]

Board was working fine for a day. Now when booting, SATA controller
BIOS will report there is a problem and to press F4 to enter raid
utility. When I press F4, the message "device not detected, utility
disabled" will appear. The system halts with a boot failure message.
Strange thing is that both drives are identified by the SATA BIOS (by
their make and size). I assumed this was due to a problem with the
primary drive, so I disconnected the primary, and tried rebooting with
just the secondary connected (running raid-1). The same thing
happens. I am stuck. Is this a RAID problem? If so, how do you get
into the utility to rebuild the raid. Is this a controller problem?
I have already ordered another board to see if this fixes it, but was
wondering what else I could try before swapping them. Any help would
be appreciated.

 

[Ben Pope]

Board was working fine for a day. Now when booting, SATA controller
BIOS will report there is a problem and to press F4 to enter raid
utility. When I press F4, the message "device not detected, utility
disabled" will appear. The system halts with a boot failure message.
Strange thing is that both drives are identified by the SATA BIOS (by
their make and size). I assumed this was due to a problem with the
primary drive, so I disconnected the primary, and tried rebooting with
just the secondary connected (running raid-1). The same thing
happens. I am stuck. Is this a RAID problem? If so, how do you get
into the utility to rebuild the raid. Is this a controller problem?
I have already ordered another board to see if this fixes it, but was
wondering what else I could try before swapping them. Any help would
be appreciated.

I take it you are using RAID then? There's a windows utility, not sure what
it can do 'cos I don't have RAID.

I recommend using the latest BIOS (1007) and drivers (1.0.0.40) and seeing
if the problem persists.

Info in my FAQ.

Ben

 

[owlbird]

Hi, it's easy. Please visit http://www.ptdd.com and download Partition
Table Doctor to help you

 

[JBM]

I just bought the registered version of this file.
Mcafee said it was infected with the W32/Valla.a virus
I've sent ptdd.com an e-mail about it.
reboot.exe is the file that's infected.
The virus doesn't do much, just puts a statement about
world peace at the end of files. Could eat up a lot of drive
space.

 

[JBM]

Received two emails from support at ptdd.com the first said that
their security scanner found no problems. Then two hours later
the second email said there was a problem in reboot.exe.
And there was an attachment containing pdd.zip without
reboot.exe. So it looks like they fixed the problem

 

[RichardBarrett]

Received two emails from support at ptdd.com the first said that
their security scanner found no problems. Then two hours later
the second email said there was a problem in reboot.exe.
And there was an attachment containing pdd.zip without
reboot.exe. So it looks like they fixed the problem

I have exactly the same problem. Did Partition Table Doctor fix it?

 

[dnc_tn]

Since it is "dual channel" memory, does this mean I "have to" use two
sticks of ram or can I still use one stick of ram. I read the
documentation and still couldn't get this information.

I'm a Newbie trying to build a system with this board is why I ask.

I want to use a single stick of "pc3200 512meg nonECC unbuffered" of
Ram.

thanks.

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

You can use a single stick of RAM, and it will run happily in
single-channel mode.

 

[dgk]

Since it is "dual channel" memory, does this mean I "have to" use two
sticks of ram or can I still use one stick of ram. I read the
documentation and still couldn't get this information.

I'm a Newbie trying to build a system with this board is why I ask.

I want to use a single stick of "pc3200 512meg nonECC unbuffered" of
Ram.

thanks.

Sure, that's what I have now. I was able to overclock much better with
just one stick.

 

[Ed]

Since it is "dual channel" memory, does this mean I "have to" use two
sticks of ram or can I still use one stick of ram. I read the
documentation and still couldn't get this information.

I'm a Newbie trying to build a system with this board is why I ask.

I want to use a single stick of "pc3200 512meg nonECC unbuffered" of
Ram.

thanks.

It will work with 1, 2 or 3 sticks of any compatible ram for that board,
but to utilize dual channel memory feature on the mobo itself (which
only results in about a 5% boost) you would want to install 2 or more
sticks of ram in one of the following sequence: Sockets 1&3, Sockets 2&3
or Sockets 1,2&3.

HTH,
Ed

 

[RichardBarrett]

I have exactly the same problem. Did Partition Table Doctor fix it?

Can anybody help, please?

I have an A7N8X deluxe 2.0 with dual Maxtor 160GB SATA drives
which I tried to configure as RAID-1. A problem
occurred when copying from primary to secondary. Now I, too, get
the "Device not Detected, utility disabled" message after the BIOS
runs and can't move beyound this.

I've tried updating the BIOS to Uber 1007 and that has no effect.
MaxBlast3 can't see the drives at all when run from Windows on
an IDE drive. Powermax just fails. SiliconImage's SATARaid Windows
utlity can't see the drives. But they're there because the BIOS
reports them and even offers me the option to boot Windows 2K from
them (it crashes, of course).
What do I do next? There seems no way back.
Does anyone have experience of Partition Table Doctor in fixing
this problem?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[dnc_tn]

Already have 2 of the 3 ram banks full with '256Meg pc3200 nonECC
unbuffered RAM', wanted to know if I can use that last remaining bank
for a 512M stick or do I have to "Match" everything up, like all 256's
or all 512's or all 1gig's etc...

many thanks.

 

[Paul]

Already have 2 of the 3 ram banks full with '256Meg pc3200 nonECC
unbuffered RAM', wanted to know if I can use that last remaining bank
for a 512M stick or do I have to "Match" everything up, like all 256's
or all 512's or all 1gig's etc...

many thanks.

If you have 256+256 in slot 1 and slot 2, balance it with
a 512MB stick in slot 3. Slot 1 and slot2 are on one
channel, while slot 3 is on its own channel. (You can see this
for yourself, by looking at the motherboard, and noting
where the termination resistors and Vtt filter caps are
located. You'll see orderly columns of tiny components
for those two functions, one set of terminations per
channel.)

The memory interface interleaves between channels, so if
each channel has an equal amount, you get dual channel
behavior all the way to the top of memory. The Nforce2
is different than the Intel and AMD controllers, as
they use the "Uber DIMM" concept, and two DIMMs are
essentially treated as a single 128bit wide DIMM. The
Nvidia design treats the two channels as separate 64bit
suppliers of bandwidth, and DIMM matching requirements are
relaxed. For the Nforce2 apparently, only matching the
quantity of memory on each channel, is all that is
required for best results. The memory can only run
as fast as the slowest stick being used, so mixing a
dud 512MB with two 256MB Corsair sticks, would be a
mistake if you want to get the best use of the more
expensive memory.

I modified a copy of memtest86, and added the ability to
test memory bandwidth as a function of memory address.
If you put 512+512 on one channel, and a single 512MB
stick on the second channel, then 2/3 of the memory space
runs at dual channel bandwidth. This is the result I got
when the channels weren't matched - I had 1.5GB total
memory in this unbalanced configuration, and the top
512MB of it is slower than the rest.

http://groups.google.ca/[email protected]

Address Memory bandwidth
(Hex) (MB/sec)
08000000 1435 ; (This is address 128MB)
10000000 1435
18000000 1435
20000000 1435
28000000 1435
30000000 1435
38000000 1435
40000000 916 ; (This is address 1GB)
48000000 916
50000000 916
58000000 916

Few applications are as memory dependent as the memory
test program above, so real applications won't see such an
extreme difference. Many people note only a 5% difference
or so, between single and dual channel, which is a lot less
than the measurement here is showing. Maybe someday, someone
will run one of those Photoshop test suites, and give us the
real story on the difference between single channel and dual
channel on this board.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Helinut]

Im sure the above poster has a far greater knowledge than me, but there is
one thing I think he has missed.
The A7N8X motherboard has a version called A7N8X-X. If you have this board,
it is not a dual channel board so "balancing" the channels doesnt matter.
However I suppose it is irelevant as I would also say go for 512Mb as there
is no need to balance the memory on a non dual channel board.