Well, I'm pissed. I spent $1,000 on parts to build a gaming PC and ended up with a doorstop.

ASUS A8N-SLI MB
AMD Athlon 64 2.0Ghz
ASUS PCI-Express 256mb Geforce 6600
Patriot 1G RAM
Western Digital 160G Caviar SE WD1600JD SATA
Attempted XPsp2

At first the drive was detected by BIOS and Windows without intervention. The OS installed and I was rolling ... for about ten minutes. The system crashed and thereafter went to blue screen/stop error, but rebooted so quickly I could not read it. I'm thinking corrupted OS so I re-install. No good. BIOS can't see the drive, Windows can't see the drive. Thus begins the frustrating quest for info. I tried suggestions from ASUS (which has a very unreliable support section --- "service unavailable" all the time), Western Digital, Microsoft, and about a dozen tech forums like this one. I tried swapping SATA cables, used all four SATA ports, tried SATA power and legacy power, disabled RAID, enabled RAID with JBOD, flashed the BIOS with an update from ASUS, F6'd the Nvidia RAID drivers and then the SIL3114 drivers. Nothing has worked. But I did find out that this problem is very common with ASUS boards judging by the hundreds of posts just like this one. At this point I'm thinking the HD or MB is defective. I'm returning the HD for another. God, I hope it's not the MB. Half the time when I enable RAID I can no longer enter BIOS setup and the other half I cannot enter the RAID utility. It's a mystery.

Installing a single bootable disk should not be this difficult. NASA can send a disk to Mars where it works under harsh conditions for over a year, yet I cannot install a SATA HD in my living room. What happened to HD technology? It's disgusting. If the next SATA doesn't work I'll have to try ULTRA DMA. If that doesn't work I'll have to contact ASUS, which I'm sure will only prolong this nightmare. About the only thing I haven't tried is an old 8G IDE drive. Do I really have to do that?

Have I covered all the bases?

first, think about what you'll want to do. You have only one drive, so RAID is out of question here. Then nforce 4 has native SATA support, so, you'll want to use the nforce4 IDE controller and not the SIL. At this point, you have to make sure that RAID is disabled for nforce4 and that the Sil controller is disabled in the BIOS. So connect your HDD to the nforce4 SATA1 connector.

This way, you should be able to install windows. If it doesnt work,, then I maybe your CD or DVD optical device has problem with the nforce4 chipset, as it is the case with BenQ dvd burner with older firmware. Try another one if you can. Maybe you could test your RAM to see if it is good. Download memtest and test it. You'll need a floppy disk for that.

<font color=red>Sig space for rent. make your offer.</font color=red>

NASA can send a disk to Mars where it works under harsh conditions for over a year, yet I cannot install a SATA HD in my living room.
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The difference being training and experience.

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

I tried both, Pat. And there is no SIL reference in the BIOS. The board ships with four onboard SATA ports. ASUS claims SATA support. So why shouldn't I be able to just plug it in? Why shouldn't BIOS detect something plugged into a board it is designed to accept? That's not an unreasonable expectation.

And, Rich, installing a SATA drive should not require the training and experience of a NASA technician. That's just ridiculous. Moreover, ASUS has no (emphasis on no) instructions on how to install a single SATA drive. I only discovered this common problem after researching numerous tech boards. It's poor planning on their part. If the same exact problem is being experienced by hundreds of people, the blame is on ASUS. We are not all stupid.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by timr123 on 06/12/05 02:10 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Oh.. is there is any Sil controller on your motherboard? If there is only 4 of them, I'm sure that they are the 4 provided by the nforce4. Maybe the deluxe version has the Sil controller.

In this case, if your SATA controller is not set to RAID, then you should be able to just plug the drive and go. I have setted up multiple nforce3 board with SATA and they are only a matter of plugging the drive and go. I did the same on various nforce4 motherboard, even a new Asus an4-e.

I'm not on broadband internet, so I wont download the manual from Asus and check it. But if you are sure that RAID is disabled and you are using the nvidia controller, then if it dont work, I would check elsewhere. As I told you in my other post, I would test the RAM and try another optical device.

<font color=red>Sig space for rent. make your offer.</font color=red>