I need some advice...

After a few headaches, I was finally able to do a fresh install on my new Maxtor 160 Gb Serial ATA Drive on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe. Per Windows XP's request, I loaded the needed serial ata controller drivers via a floppy during Windows XP installation. Then the Windows XP installation continued like normal. Everything seemed to go fine...

Here's where everything got screwy.

1) For some reason, my cpu only detects my new serial ata drive after I turn off and turn back on my cpu as opposed to a normal reboot. Whenever I tried a normal reboot my cpu hung at the serial ata "primary" and "secondary" screen.

2) Windows XP will ONLY boot if my windows xp cd is in the cp. Otherwise it hangs at a boot disk request right when windows should start loading up.

What gives? I am pretty good with cpus but this stuff has me stumped...

Sorry but is not CPU but PC.

I stand corrected, PC, not CPU.

I must not have had enough sleep last night

Anyone got any advice on how to fix either of these problems?

I have an ASUS A7n8X deluxe with a maxtor 160gb sata hd, as well it hangs on start up when it goes throught the boot device list, just like yours!!!

Can Someone please help! i have the bios boot list set up correctly, i believe.

The only way round it so far is to have a non boot floppy in the drive, let it try and boot, eject it then it boots stright to sata. v annoying doing this!

Any one have an ASUS European support number?

I am having this same issue!! A7N8x Deluxe and Windows XP. I have a WD Raptor 36GB as my primary SATA drive and the Maxtor 160GB SATA as the secondary.

Whenever the Maxtor is plugged in, the computer will halt, right after all the post information and just before going into Windows XP, with a blank screen. It will stay that way for 2 minutes, then go into windows. The only way around this has been to keep my XP install CD in the drive. When I do this, the computer boots right in to Windows with no delay. When the Maxtor is not plugged in, the delay does not happen and the computer will boot normally.

I would appreciate any help!! Send me any information or fixes you may have.

I have already tried fresh installs of Windows with the correct drivers. It seems to be something with the Maxtor drive. The WD is not affected.

Thanks in advance!

I feel your pain, grasshopper. I just got two new WD Raptor 36 GB drives, hoping to take advantage of the Serial ATA speed, and to add additional redundancy for my OS with a RAID 1 set. To my dismay, it took over 4.5 hours just to get Xp to WRITE to the Serial ATA drives. I was p**sed. I've used every permutation of two system BIOSes, two SATA BIOSes, and 3 different SATA driver versions. No matter what I do, the SATA BIOS will not detect the drives after a warm boot (operating system restart).

I have to cold-boot (power off), in order for the SATA BIOS to detect the drives. Once detected, I have no problems with booting to the SATA drives. However, my operating system does NOT behave the way it did on my older IDE configuration.

I have called ASUS, opened a trouble ticket, and they are working now, to recreate the problem. As soon as they respond to me with a solution, I will post it here for all to see.

I put the uber bios version 1005 on my computer. That fixed my problem! It also updated the bios on the embeded Serial ATA card to version 4.2.1.2.

Problem solved.

Here's what finally worked. DELETE ANY ACTIVE PARTITIONS on older parallel ATA drives. I did that, and *poof* no more problems.

*** I am yet another person having problems with this exact drive. This is my configuration:
WinXP (latest patches)
DFI NB72-SC Motherboard (with latest bios installed)
512mb PC133 RAM
20gig IBM drive for the main drive
80gig IBM slave drive
both connected directly to the motherboard
80gig Maxtor ATA133
and the new piece of sh*t 160gig ATA133
both Maxtor drives are connected to the SIIG Ultra ATA/133 Controller that I bought in place of the card that was supplied by Maxtor.

Description of problem,

Writing error that the other guy was getting. This happened when I was encoding video that was saving itself to the same drive. All drives are NTFS formatted. So that wasn't the problem as suggested above.
I tried to use a different controller card than the Promise card that was supplied in the box with the drive and that didn't help. I now see the drive showing as CALYPSO with 0MB showing for the capacity! I cannot see the drive in windows any longer and when I ran the latest version of PowerMax the test gave me this error code "UK0E02". So I went to the website for Maxtor as it instructed me to do and as far as maxtor.com is concerned that error code doesn't exsist! If anyone can help me, I'm in desperate need. I have a huge amount of data on this drive that must be recovered. I am available on yahoo instant messenger as got_80s. I am taking defensive driving right now via takehome DVD and may take a second to respond. Thanks for your time.

To boot with a SATA drive, you have to put it in the boot sequence as SCSI drive, not standard ATA...

And updating the BIOS is always a good idea.

Can somebody tell me how i Install
Win XP on a HDD connectect to the SATA Controller Without a
FDD Disc drive??? can i somehow create a WIN XP Install cd with a intregrated SATA driver??? (like integrating SP1)

I've had the same problems since building a new pc with the a7n8x deluxe and maxtor 120 gig sata drive, but now all is sorted.
I downloaded the Silicon Image Serial ATA driver version V1.0.0.22 and Utility V1.0.0.11 (which is also on the cd that comes with the mobo) but found that the instructions given didn't work!
So I copied the following files onto a floppy -
si3112r setup
si3112r system
si3112.mpd
siisupp.vxd
txtsetup.oem
I was then able to boot from the xp cd and press f6 during the setup to load a 3rd party raid driver, then press s and insert the floppy....hey presto...xp installs correctly and all is fine!!
It's also necessary to set the sata drive as scsi in the bios as it's not an ide drive and therefore isn't auto detected by the bios.
So at last i have a correctly working new pc with a hard drive that flies.....
Best of luck!!!

Thanks Mark!! Your solution saved me from going insane!!

Can somebody plz plz plz send me the serial ata drivers?
my mail is drbiloukos@yahoo.com
Thanks!

I have the same problem, but when I do the floppy drivers it installs them but then it goes through its install and then freezes at the "starting up windows" message. Any ideas? I have a Gigabyte MOBO, AMD 64 CPU, Maxtor 160GB Serial ATA HD and 1GB RAM(Kingston). Oh, I have an older Hercules video card that I'm using until I get my new one that I ordered.

Thnx, Jeff

Well, I don't know what to tell you. Did you get the correct drivers to match your OS? Are you installing Xp-64 or Xp? If your board has an Nforce3 chipset, take a look at the forums on http://www.nforcershq.com . If your machine is hanging there, at the Starting windows splash screen, try starting in safe mode, or adding the /sos switch instead of /fastdetect to the bootloader line in the boot.ini file. That will show you the drivers as they are being loaded, and if it hangs again, you should be able to see the last driver that's loading or causing the hang.

My problem ended up being with the jumper settings on my raptor drive. I felt like an idiot for not having downloaded the online documentation (I bought an OEM drive). I originally left the jumpers on the factory default PM1 (power management 1) settings with the jumper connecting pins 5 and 6. I switched to pins 7 and 8 and it identified the drive right away and installed the controller/drivers without a problem. Here is the view of the back of my raptor harddrive and how the jumpers are numbered:

TOP of Raptor Hard Drive
serial ata serial ata 1 3 5 7 legacy 4pin
power connector 2 4 6 8 power connector
BOTTOM of Raptor Hard Drive

Hope this helps.

@Mark Simpson
You saved our day! My friend bought a new computer with the ASUS 7N8X board and so my dad wanted to install WinxP on it, but WinXP and the BIOS couldn't find the mobo. My dad usually is a wizz with computers, but with this one he went berserk ;-) Anyway, I searched the net and came to this board and found your message. I sent the link to my dad and he did what you wrote...and voila...it works. So we just send you a big thanks!!! Cheers Stef and Vatta

Hmmm...let's see if i can get some help if i re-open this can of worms. I tried the suggestion that Mark Simpson posted up above. When i'm trying to install the drivers, the setup seems to be downloading the drivers, but then I get an error.

'file txtsetup.oem caused an unexpected error (1024) at line 1742 in d:\xpsp1\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.'

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi just thout i would add my thoughts. I have an Asus A7V8X and althought it came with raid and SATA ready I just used a 7200 IDE drive, then added another drive to increase storage. Well 2 nitghts before Christmas one of the hdds died and the system wouldn't boot, due to the late hour hubby went out and purchased a Seagate 7200 SATA drive.
Well I had the old boot drive (pphew) so my son could play his new games. Decided to try to install the SATA drive but the bios didn't seem to like that, went into the fastrack promise software but it wouldn't read the IDE drive and as I could not afford loss of data I was panicked.

Day after christmas tried again, checked a news group and re read the manual again. I had assumed that the SATA drive was similar to an IDE and hadn't realised that you need to use a raid setup (at least as far as I can observe) and must plug the IDE into a different (raid_Pri) socket.
Loaded okay still not recognising it in BIOS but it seems to run off the fasttrack promise controller. Followed the instructions in the manual setting up a mirror or raid_1 setup so as not to lose existing data on IDE drive. The program transferred the contents of the source drive and all works well.

Only problem is with the raid setup you only see one drive ( the original) - don't quite understand that bit yet but guess it's the the way the mirroring is supposed to work. Now I want to get another 120 SATA drive and set up a system Raid_0 for performance hence i would presume gaining the full 240 odd gigs.

Anyhow so far the drives are performing and while I save for the 2nd drive i shall prepare the old one ie backup. Well it's really late sorry all that wasn't succint but it could prove useful info.

Good luck and Merry Chrismas and New Year

Sorry, forgot to post my result as soon as i figured it out. I've been busy installing software. So the error that i got as actually related to a bad floppy drive. No big deal i guess. The method of F6 and using the drivers that came with the CD worked flawlessly from there on.