SATA problem

[Lucian]

Hallo everybody,
I am totally confused. My gigabyte 8IPE1000 Pro2 (ver.2) offers sata controllers. The bios version is the latest one( F7). My HDD is Seagate 7200.7 (ST380013AS), well cabled. Why than, in "advanced chip settings" I do not find the SCSI/SATA option activated?! Nothing to say, in the right "Item" panel there is reported this very much needed option. But in the left settings panel, finding no such possibility at all. WHY? In "Integrated peripherals" I have manually enabled onchip sata - Sata 0. Because if Auto, it appears as an Ide Secondary Master. Is there a G-byte personal bios trouble? Or my Seagate isn't a true serial ATA drive, is just a bridged ide drive? The single optical unit I have in the system is my dvd-rw also Gigabyte, set on Primary Ide as Master (tried it on Secondary as well...) Why than, my Sata drive insists to remap on an Ide Channel?? What am I supposed to do (considering that I'd respected all those installation rules - diskette sil 3112 base driver on F6 Windows XP request)?

Somebody enlights me, please?

[entropy]

it's trying to put it on an ide channel, because with a 7200 rpm drive, that's basically all it is - bridged. mine does the same thing, and there isn't one change in speed if it's on auto or sata0. actually, if you look when it boots, you can see that the 'SATA 0' you set it to, really says "IDE Channel Three". ... so it's nothing to worry about, unless you're saying you can't get windows to install at all, in which case i can't help you much lol

[Lucian]

Thanks, entrOpy!

My OS is working just fine, thanks.
Indeed you are, that's the boot representation - another Ide channel. You also say I have nothing to worry about, but Aida32 reports my drive having 100 ata transfer. Isn't that a feature for a PATA drive, am I wrong? Than 150 mb ipothetical transfer on a gigabyte (disappointing) sata MB is just a bad joke?
Anyway, I'm going to post them a note about the problem. I just wanted to do my homeworks first...
P.S. Tom's hardware : "The serial ATA interface is enhanced with a feature from SCSI: Native Command Queuing. Seagate's 7200.7 is the only native SATA interface commercially available" - So, if native my Seagate 7200.7, why G-byte doesn't behave?!

[Missileman]

Sorry to disagree. All Seagate SATA drives are true SATA and are not bridged drives. They are currently the only ones on the market. Post is always controlled by the motherboard bios entirely. More than likely it is how your bios settings are aet up.

Lucian - What you are seeing is normal because the SATA controllers on the built-in chpsets are integrated into the IDE. They use the same pathways through the bridge to the bus therefore they effectively are an IDE channel. I'm not familiar with the Gigabyte board, but on my Abit IC7 the SATA acts like an IDE secondary until I switch it to enhanced mode and turn on RAID. When I enable RAID bios it then acts like a separate controller and posts drives and so on. On my NF7-S I only need to enable the Si3112 and turn on the RAID bios and it posts as separate.

One common mistake people make is they only want to run a single drive and aren't going to build a RAID so they don't enable the RAID bios which effectively disables the controller. You do not have to run RAID to use the RAID controller, but you do have to use the RAID controller bios and RAID driver to get it to work as a separate device. You'll need someone familiar with that motherboard to help you get the settings you need.