Problems with hard drives and asus a7n8x e deluxe

[Mat Walker]

Hello,

I'm trying to setup a new asus a7n8x e deluxe mobo with a Athalon
2400xp. The board appears to work fine but I'm having real trouble
getting an operatic system to recognise any ide harddrive correctly.

On the bios settings it recognises the correct size of the hardrive but
when setting up in Xp it says that the drive is only 7993 meg
regardless of what size drive I put in actually is. I'm pretty sure
that the problem lies with the mobo because it also comes up with
simlar problems under Linux and in either OS when I try and install to
the hard drive they bith throw up errors and bomb out.

I've tried a variety of ide harddrives new and old and various sizes.
I've also updated the bios and disabled SATA but with no joy.
Any ideas of have I got a faulty board?

Thanks,

Mat

 

[Mat Walker]

Hello again,

Is it possible that its human error on this one? Is this board only
compatible with SATA drives and not IDE?
Any words of wisdom gratefully recieved!

Mat

 

[Paul]

Hello again,

Is it possible that its human error on this one? Is this board only
compatible with SATA drives and not IDE?
Any words of wisdom gratefully recieved!

Mat

Have you been messing with the IDE HDD Auto-Detection ?
Everything should be set to Auto, then the BIOS can do
LBA for itself, opening up the full drive for use.

Since you say you can see the whole thing in the BIOS,
but are having a problem in Windows, then maybe everything
really is still set to auto.

A second possibility, is you formatted the drives with the
disk drive manufacturer's drive formatting software. These
formatters use a "disk overlay", a method of remapping the
drive to solve capacity problems. But the cure is worse
than the problem.

As far as I'm concerned, you should format the drive
in Windows, using the MS version of formatting. This will
avoid the drive overlay layer, and should give you a more
portable disk drive. If you have another computer, zero the
drive and start it from scratch (remembering to back up any
valuable files on it first, of course). (That is assuming that
WinXP refuses to do the job during a fresh install. I suppose
anything is possible.)

The reason for avoiding overlays, is not all third party
software is going to like an overlay, like some old partitioning
software, or maybe Linux or something. Keep your config
as simple and as standard as possible, to make data recovery in
a future accident/crash as easy as possible. While many
programs will be savvy about overlays, it is best not to
rely on that clever coding.

I haven't needed to use a Maxtor/WD/Seagate formatter yet.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Mat Walker]

Thanks for the advice Paul.

I'd be inclined to agree with you but I've not used any formatting
software.

I've tried using a few IDE drives of various sizes but with no joy:

1 Seagate 200g IDE unformatted
1 Matrox 120g IDE formatted
1 Western Digital 60g (Previous XP installation)

I've also tried partitioning software and zeroing the drives with the
software from bootdisk.com.

Any other ideas?

 

[Mat Walker]

For the benefit of the archive.

It turns out its a fault with the IDE controller on the board. I've
been in contact with Asus tech support and they confirm this.
Thanks anyway.