GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2 SATA RAID and Maxtor 250GB Nightmare
Key Words for searches: GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2, Maxtor 250GB SATA, Silicon Image, Sil 3512
Post Preface: I am not writing this to get help. The help has already come. This is written so this problem can get picked up with detail in the search engines so when others have the same problem they don’t spend three days on the Internet as I did doing Google searches trying to find what in the world they should or could do. I previously posted on three or four forums trying to get answers and of course searching every forum I could find, most I had never even heard of. Gigabyte themselves were not much help with their fancy shmancy e-mail support and I will attach their responses. My first post was on the www.amdmb.com forum (forums.pcper.com): http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=369267
System Specs:
Athlon XP 2600+ Barton
GA-7n400 Pro2 Rev 2 Bios FJ (current)
(2) Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA 250GB HDDs.
Geil 512 MB DDR PC3200
Visiontek GeFarce Ti4600 128mb
Samsung DVD/CD-R
Sony Floppy
Symptoms:
GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2 is not recognizing SATA DiamondMax 10 250 GB HDDs on RAID. We aren’t talking about Windows setup. This is the actual BIOS setup process whereas the drives are searched out by the BIOS and if found recognized. At the point of recognition the BIOS will give the opportunity to “Press <CTR-S> or F4 to enter the RAID utility.” My system doesn’t see the drives so I enter the RAID utility as prescribed. Then I receive the notice: "No device detected, Utility disabled! Press any key to cont...."
Diagnosis Process:
After flashing the BIOS from the original to the FJ I then retried as described above. I then Google searched the following message from the BIOS “"No device detected, Utility disabled! Press any key to cont...." in quotes, which returned much valuable information. You can quickly figure out that many people have had this problem with several different motherboards and mobo manufactures. But, more specifically this is a problem that is specific to only Silicon Image (http://www.siimage.com) RAID chipsets. That conclusion was derived from googling “Gigabyte GA 7N400 Pro Maxtor conflict RAID.” At this point the evidence is just stacked against these poor folks at Silicon Image. There are serious flaws in their BIOS, all of them, and they can’t seem to sort it all out. While they, to their credit, have updated their BIOS for this chipset several times you can’t just download the BIOS and flash it as this is not the board’s BIOS, but rather just the RAID controllers BIOS which is built into the board. I found a site called “Short-Media.com” and they had some actual user hacked and built FJ BIOS’s for the motherboard that incorporated the current RAID Silicon Image BIOS version; much to Gigabyte’s chagrin they haven’t implemented the new SiL BIOS with the FJ or further BIOS revisions (who knows why?). In any case, the custom BIOS (two of them) that I found on this forum thread (http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20543) successfully flashed my 7N400 to FJ and the SiL RAID chip to the current BIOS as listed on their sorry website. However, the problem was not solved with this, showing the inherent problem with the SiL Raid controller that is so frequently being attached to Gigabyte motherboards in the past year or so.
Prescription for Resolution & Comment:
After all of this problem and money, I deserve a moment of comment and opinion and then I will get to the nitty gritty on the resolution, as they work together naturally.
Gigabyte, and I guess other board manufactures have as well, have forgone the “ol’ faithful” standards for RAID chipsets: Promise or Highpoint for others. As it was once said to me on a flight from JFK Intl to Paris France on a Boeing 767 right before lining up on the runway for takeoff, “You know this airplane was built with every part being developed and manufactured by the lowest bidder.” Not too comforting when it is your first flight across the pond! So, OK, Gigabyte saved a whole $1 or less per board, but they have a mess on their hands…and the bad part is I think they know they do. The problem isn’t that evident right now, because there aren’t that many SATA Maxtor drives out there above 160 GB (that seems to be the floor on the size and the conflicts). But, soon enough, enthusiast are going to be installing ever bigger drives into their ever faster systems with their ever bigger motherboards with features being crammed onto them with ever millimeter of available PCP board space. And quite frankly, the problem isn’t just Maxtor specific as I saw plenty of Western Digital post as well, but admiringly no Hitachi related post. But, I do think Maxtor has the bulk of the problems here, with SiL to eventually blame.
It all boils down to this - Motherboard makers: Come back to Promise for your RAID please!
Resolution: What I finally resorted to for a solution
After spending three days researching and testing the only solution I could come up with was replacing the board with a solution other than Silicon Graphics installed as the SATA RAID controller. I finally purchased a MSI K8T Neo (MS-6702) VIA chipset. Of course, this is a AMD Athlon 64 chipset board and I had to upgrade my processor as well, but I was tired of throwing money into the toilet…if I was going to spend the cash I was going to do it right! This was a hard decision, as I have been an avid user and system builder for Gigabyte for years. I like MSI, Asus, Abit and others, but Gigabyte always laid everything out very nicely, plenty of USB and Firewire (negating the need for ever having to buy a USB hub), the awesome printing on the PCB that was so easy to read you didn’t even need the manual and I never had any problems whatsoever. But, in the past year they have gone to Silicon Graphics for their RAID and this has showed in quality control issues. If your not going to use the RAID controller, Gigabyte is still a dead-on favorite, but quite frankly no enthusiast knows where they are going to be in this industry in six months. It is better to plan for the future and plan ahead. Even MSI has some SiL controllers; I hope this isn’t a trend in the industry. Even when SiL “works” it is a very slow RAID solution, according to much of my research…so I don’t understand the advantage other than good ol’ fashioned cost of production – cash!
Gigaybite’s Answer via E-mail support
Question - 147614
From : Wilson Hines [ wilsonhinesAThotmail.com ]
Sent : 2004/12/17 21:02
Question : Cannot get SATA RAID to detect my two SATA Hard drives, identical Maxtor Diamond Max 10 250 GB SATA Hdds. RAID software says no drives exist...they are plugged in and running.
Answer - 147614
Answer : Hi,
Are these 2 hdd going to be your primary OS?
If so then you will need to create the array and follow the below procedure to setup sata for this motherboard.
If you have two SATA HDDs, you can set them to either RAID 0 or RAID 1.
#1 -
In the BIOS - Make sure the "Onboard H/W Serial ATA " is enable and set the "Serial ATA Function" to "RAID"under the "Integrated Peripheral".
Under the "advanced BIOS feature" -
#2 -
You need to prepare the RAID driver on the floppy disk.
1) Browse the M/B utility CD.
2) Open the "bootdrv" folder.
3) Double click "Menu".
4) Type the number for the needed driver (SilRAID). It will copy the driver to the floppy disk automatically.
You also need to setup the RAID 0 / RAID 1 in the Silicon Image RAID setup utility. (Press "Ctrl+S" to get into the RAID utility and read the instruction on the "SATA RAID function" user manual for how to set the RAID.)
When you boot from the CD and the Windows setup screen comes up, press "F6" to install the 3rd party driver and follow the instruction to install the OS.
If not then you will need to make sure you have the Sil Raid driver loaded once under windows then go into Disk Mangement for the hdd to show up so you can partition and format the drive.
Thank you
Answer - 148046
Answer : Hi,
We have tested up to 300gb sata hdd on this motherboard without any issue. Since you have rev 2.0 of the motherboard please make sure that you have the FJ bios up to date.
http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Support/BIOS/BIOS_GA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 2.0).htm
From there please try both sata ports and different sata cables.
Thank you
Question - 148046
From : Wilson Hines [ wilsonhinesAThotmail.com ]
Sent : 2004/12/18 23:08
Question : Thanks for the reply: The Bios is setup as you have required. The problem is not with the boards BIOS settings, rather that the controller doesn't recognize the HDDs. After pressing CTRL+S or F4 to enter the RAID utility I get the following message: "No device detected, Utility disabled ! Press any key to continue..." It actually went into the utility ONCE but it only saw one of the HDDs; I never got it to recognize anything from there out. I have flashed to every single BIOS you have on your site, currently back to the latest available. After MUCH research on the web, there are a few folks out there with the same problem and MOST of them are Gigabyte users. I am an avid Gigabyte user, have been for years & this is rather frustrating. It would seem this is the SiI SATARaid controller having a problem with these HDDs, not the board itself.
Your continued support is appreciated.
Answer - 148046
Answer : Hi,
We have tested up to 300gb sata hdd on this motherboard without any issue. Since you have rev 2.0 of the motherboard please make sure that you have the FJ bios up to date.
From there please try both sata ports and different sata cables.
Thank you
Post Preface: I am not writing this to get help. The help has already come. This is written so this problem can get picked up with detail in the search engines so when others have the same problem they don’t spend three days on the Internet as I did doing Google searches trying to find what in the world they should or could do. I previously posted on three or four forums trying to get answers and of course searching every forum I could find, most I had never even heard of. Gigabyte themselves were not much help with their fancy shmancy e-mail support and I will attach their responses. My first post was on the www.amdmb.com forum (forums.pcper.com): http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=369267
System Specs:
Athlon XP 2600+ Barton
GA-7n400 Pro2 Rev 2 Bios FJ (current)
(2) Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA 250GB HDDs.
Geil 512 MB DDR PC3200
Visiontek GeFarce Ti4600 128mb
Samsung DVD/CD-R
Sony Floppy
Symptoms:
GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2 is not recognizing SATA DiamondMax 10 250 GB HDDs on RAID. We aren’t talking about Windows setup. This is the actual BIOS setup process whereas the drives are searched out by the BIOS and if found recognized. At the point of recognition the BIOS will give the opportunity to “Press <CTR-S> or F4 to enter the RAID utility.” My system doesn’t see the drives so I enter the RAID utility as prescribed. Then I receive the notice: "No device detected, Utility disabled! Press any key to cont...."
Diagnosis Process:
After flashing the BIOS from the original to the FJ I then retried as described above. I then Google searched the following message from the BIOS “"No device detected, Utility disabled! Press any key to cont...." in quotes, which returned much valuable information. You can quickly figure out that many people have had this problem with several different motherboards and mobo manufactures. But, more specifically this is a problem that is specific to only Silicon Image (http://www.siimage.com) RAID chipsets. That conclusion was derived from googling “Gigabyte GA 7N400 Pro Maxtor conflict RAID.” At this point the evidence is just stacked against these poor folks at Silicon Image. There are serious flaws in their BIOS, all of them, and they can’t seem to sort it all out. While they, to their credit, have updated their BIOS for this chipset several times you can’t just download the BIOS and flash it as this is not the board’s BIOS, but rather just the RAID controllers BIOS which is built into the board. I found a site called “Short-Media.com” and they had some actual user hacked and built FJ BIOS’s for the motherboard that incorporated the current RAID Silicon Image BIOS version; much to Gigabyte’s chagrin they haven’t implemented the new SiL BIOS with the FJ or further BIOS revisions (who knows why?). In any case, the custom BIOS (two of them) that I found on this forum thread (http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20543) successfully flashed my 7N400 to FJ and the SiL RAID chip to the current BIOS as listed on their sorry website. However, the problem was not solved with this, showing the inherent problem with the SiL Raid controller that is so frequently being attached to Gigabyte motherboards in the past year or so.
Prescription for Resolution & Comment:
After all of this problem and money, I deserve a moment of comment and opinion and then I will get to the nitty gritty on the resolution, as they work together naturally.
Gigabyte, and I guess other board manufactures have as well, have forgone the “ol’ faithful” standards for RAID chipsets: Promise or Highpoint for others. As it was once said to me on a flight from JFK Intl to Paris France on a Boeing 767 right before lining up on the runway for takeoff, “You know this airplane was built with every part being developed and manufactured by the lowest bidder.” Not too comforting when it is your first flight across the pond! So, OK, Gigabyte saved a whole $1 or less per board, but they have a mess on their hands…and the bad part is I think they know they do. The problem isn’t that evident right now, because there aren’t that many SATA Maxtor drives out there above 160 GB (that seems to be the floor on the size and the conflicts). But, soon enough, enthusiast are going to be installing ever bigger drives into their ever faster systems with their ever bigger motherboards with features being crammed onto them with ever millimeter of available PCP board space. And quite frankly, the problem isn’t just Maxtor specific as I saw plenty of Western Digital post as well, but admiringly no Hitachi related post. But, I do think Maxtor has the bulk of the problems here, with SiL to eventually blame.
It all boils down to this - Motherboard makers: Come back to Promise for your RAID please!
Resolution: What I finally resorted to for a solution
After spending three days researching and testing the only solution I could come up with was replacing the board with a solution other than Silicon Graphics installed as the SATA RAID controller. I finally purchased a MSI K8T Neo (MS-6702) VIA chipset. Of course, this is a AMD Athlon 64 chipset board and I had to upgrade my processor as well, but I was tired of throwing money into the toilet…if I was going to spend the cash I was going to do it right! This was a hard decision, as I have been an avid user and system builder for Gigabyte for years. I like MSI, Asus, Abit and others, but Gigabyte always laid everything out very nicely, plenty of USB and Firewire (negating the need for ever having to buy a USB hub), the awesome printing on the PCB that was so easy to read you didn’t even need the manual and I never had any problems whatsoever. But, in the past year they have gone to Silicon Graphics for their RAID and this has showed in quality control issues. If your not going to use the RAID controller, Gigabyte is still a dead-on favorite, but quite frankly no enthusiast knows where they are going to be in this industry in six months. It is better to plan for the future and plan ahead. Even MSI has some SiL controllers; I hope this isn’t a trend in the industry. Even when SiL “works” it is a very slow RAID solution, according to much of my research…so I don’t understand the advantage other than good ol’ fashioned cost of production – cash!
Gigaybite’s Answer via E-mail support
Question - 147614
From : Wilson Hines [ wilsonhinesAThotmail.com ]
Sent : 2004/12/17 21:02
Question : Cannot get SATA RAID to detect my two SATA Hard drives, identical Maxtor Diamond Max 10 250 GB SATA Hdds. RAID software says no drives exist...they are plugged in and running.
Answer - 147614
Answer : Hi,
Are these 2 hdd going to be your primary OS?
If so then you will need to create the array and follow the below procedure to setup sata for this motherboard.
If you have two SATA HDDs, you can set them to either RAID 0 or RAID 1.
#1 -
In the BIOS - Make sure the "Onboard H/W Serial ATA " is enable and set the "Serial ATA Function" to "RAID"under the "Integrated Peripheral".
Under the "advanced BIOS feature" -
#2 -
You need to prepare the RAID driver on the floppy disk.
1) Browse the M/B utility CD.
2) Open the "bootdrv" folder.
3) Double click "Menu".
4) Type the number for the needed driver (SilRAID). It will copy the driver to the floppy disk automatically.
You also need to setup the RAID 0 / RAID 1 in the Silicon Image RAID setup utility. (Press "Ctrl+S" to get into the RAID utility and read the instruction on the "SATA RAID function" user manual for how to set the RAID.)
When you boot from the CD and the Windows setup screen comes up, press "F6" to install the 3rd party driver and follow the instruction to install the OS.
If not then you will need to make sure you have the Sil Raid driver loaded once under windows then go into Disk Mangement for the hdd to show up so you can partition and format the drive.
Thank you
Answer - 148046
Answer : Hi,
We have tested up to 300gb sata hdd on this motherboard without any issue. Since you have rev 2.0 of the motherboard please make sure that you have the FJ bios up to date.
http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Support/BIOS/BIOS_GA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 2.0).htm
From there please try both sata ports and different sata cables.
Thank you
Question - 148046
From : Wilson Hines [ wilsonhinesAThotmail.com ]
Sent : 2004/12/18 23:08
Question : Thanks for the reply: The Bios is setup as you have required. The problem is not with the boards BIOS settings, rather that the controller doesn't recognize the HDDs. After pressing CTRL+S or F4 to enter the RAID utility I get the following message: "No device detected, Utility disabled ! Press any key to continue..." It actually went into the utility ONCE but it only saw one of the HDDs; I never got it to recognize anything from there out. I have flashed to every single BIOS you have on your site, currently back to the latest available. After MUCH research on the web, there are a few folks out there with the same problem and MOST of them are Gigabyte users. I am an avid Gigabyte user, have been for years & this is rather frustrating. It would seem this is the SiI SATARaid controller having a problem with these HDDs, not the board itself.
Your continued support is appreciated.
Answer - 148046
Answer : Hi,
We have tested up to 300gb sata hdd on this motherboard without any issue. Since you have rev 2.0 of the motherboard please make sure that you have the FJ bios up to date.
From there please try both sata ports and different sata cables.
Thank you
0
Comments
I am almost sure it would work with the pci SATA adapter. Is it just one drive? Have you tried it?
Thanks
I have one of those Gigabyte boards, using it wth 2 x SATA WD 120Gb's in a RAID 0, no problems, I don't even have the latest BIOS, I'm using version f11 I think.
I don't think I'll be considering upgrading the hard drives then
Some of the guys at this site are really very good at creating and offering modded Bios's, nice to see you made use of one of them.
A shame about Gigabyte appearing to be fouling up here, I've always liked their product, even if they're not the best overclocking boards available.
You may not have any problems with a set of Western Digital's over 120 GB, but then again....
I guess this post is a warning as much as a help to those who get stuck...in other words, go ahead and try...but be aware of the risk.
Thanks
In fact, with the Gigabyte K-7VAXP the Western Digital PCI SATA RAID adapter didn't work for me, that is what got me in the mobo buying mood in the first place. Western Digital telephone support told me they had some PCI adapter troubles with Gigabyte and Abit - and remember, that was a Promise chipset.
It is just a lot of "ifs, ands or buts"
Here is the text from the original post in case it disapears also
Anyway, the general process involves
1. Unzipping the files to a boot floppy
2. Boot to floppy
3. At the A prompt type g.bat
4. Dont touch it until it says it's finished.
Finally once again.. DONT DO THIS IF YOU ARE ON A RAID CONTROLLER!!!! I could not get it to recognize the drives on the NVidia or the SiL, my guess is, if you can use the Powermax Util you are fine, if not DONT RISK IT...
Good luck.. This finally does really once and for all fix the issue....
One final note, if you guys and Gals can cross post this on any other Forums you frequent we might finally get this issue put to bed once and for all.
However it's not as serious as some have experienced as I wanted the two maxtor drives as mirrored storage, the PC itself is using another IDE drive as boot drive.
So, before I chop this motherboard into a thousand little pieces, can anyone recommend a PCI SATA RAID card that I can use instead - obviously not one with a silicon image chipset - are Adaptec cards any good? Preferably a recomendation from someone who has installed the same Maxtor drives with said card.
To think I was recommended Gigabyte because they're stable - never again.
Does this issue only apply to speicifc Maxtor drives or is it just all large drives in general?
baj
Edit: Nevermind... i'll juist buy the IDE versions of this drive and save the risk. At least that way i know it will work.
Dear Six,
Thanks for your lenghty and very thorough post. You went to a huge amount of trouble, and i felt i should post with my own problems.
I was smitten by the GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2. It was everything i wanted, i bought two WD 160G SATA Raid edition drives to go with it.
They had been set up as a Raid Mirror - but this broke (Mirror was lost) and i havent re-applied it.
Whenever the SATA controller feels like a change - it would drop one of the hard drives. This is for no reason, however at the moment my big worry is that generally i cant find a way to re-find it once it has been lost.
I was originally so over-awed by the board (as it was just perfect for my need) that i bought a further two, thus building some redundacy incase of a failure. The problem is re-occuring in the other systems too.
Your fault diagnosis seems to completly match my problems, and I thank you for that. I shall be emailing gigabyte and posting on the website from where I bought the motherboard. Maybe if everyone who has the problem posts to gigabyte and the suppliers, they migth be shamed into releasing an updated bios.... a long shot but who knows.
You are right regarding highpoint. I used Raid0 arrays with highpoint for years with no issues at all. They were always reliable and very fast. What a shame this Sata Sil 3512 isnt...
They're Seagate ST3300831A's and they're whisper quiet and just a little faster than my older WD1200JB's. Hehe i love them!
baj
I have had same problems with GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2 SATA RAID and Maxtor 200GB which I managed to get around using slipstreamed windows xp with sil drivers.
Now I have drive apparently "working" with windows installed.
Problem is, whenever I am trying to extract files or copy data to the hard drive, it gets real slow, uses loads of processor then eventually locks up. Anything over a few mb seems to cause problems.
Tried all sorts of other setups to no avail. Could this possibly be a faulty drive?
Thanks
My suggestion is that if you like the board, and you have the opportunity, try and sell your SATA drives and buy some IDEs instead. You really will not notice very much of a difference in speed; trust me.
baj
Bought a PCI/SATA Controller card with exactly the same SATA chip as my mobo (Sil3112) and it works a treat!?!?!
Still had to use slipstreamed copy of windows though as the SATA card came with drivers on cd but instructions were for installing using f6 with a floppy disk??
I my just go find a 300 - 500GB ide and be done with it for a while
very frustrating:-/
I have upgraded to two Raptor 74GB drives that I wanted to strip.
Again problems emerged when the Raptors were set to strip (or mirror) and I wanted to then install on the "stripped" drive.
My windows CD would not recognise this array, (or the previous WD 160G mirrored array), but only see individual drives. This is wierd, as I am sure it worked before.
After some further research (which brought me back here) I found the following (and also repeating what others have said).
Check the bios version and driver version are the same - I can verify that using the wrong drivers on a floppy to the bios version will not allow you to recognise the drives correctly.
Change WinXP disk - I have many disks - and the one I was using seems to be without the right driver (?)
I am going to see if I can ask nicely on the other board RE modded bios to see if I can ask for a bios including the new 1.1.052 driver and the latest release bios. If you have a 7n400 Pro2 rev2 may want to see if i get a reply.
http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20543 (look for page 13 reply 242)
Thanks again to all those who have helped highlight this problem, and kept it here for me to refer back to (many times)
http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/manuals/diamondmax_10_product_manual_sata.pdf
This seems to be a general problem with Gigabyte motherboards and Sata II drives. I have a GA-7V600-P-L Motherboard and a Seagate 200Gb Sata II Drive and I had the same problem. At least Maxtor drives supply you with a jumper to change. I had to rob a jumper off an old drive to get my Seagate to work.
Hope this helps.
Anthony
Wish I'd looked into this before buying a new drive. Maxtor SATA 2 250GB, Model 6V250F0. Jumper set for SATA 1 (150GB/s).
Same problem, clean install of XP went OK and fast. Now when I try to copy a file bigger than a few MB, it is slower than copying to a floppy, next to no disk activity. Eventually system hangs, ctrl-alt-del does nothing, have to press reset button.
I'm well p1ssed off at this, board has SATA, why should I have to buy a PCI sata card to get HDD to work? Gigabyte need to pull their finger out and sort this mess out, either a new bios with a SiL bios that works or FREE PCI SATA cards for anyone with this problem.
I'm contacting Gigabyte UK and demanding a new board, refund or free PCI card under the EU Sale of Goods. Goods must be fit for purpose, even if defect discovered years later, manufaturer & retailer still liable.
Thanks to this thread, at least I can stop wasting my time trying to make it work.