NF7-S 2.0 and data corruption
Hi, I have been enjoying reading these forums for a while for troubleshooting hints, but now comes the time where i got a problem that I cannot solve.
I own a NF7-S 2.0 motherboard (with the 3112A controller) and had a single SATA 200gb WD HD in it until a week ago, then i put in an extra SATA 250WD and suddenly started to notice bad data occuring. Now before somone suggest upgrade bios etc I HAVE looked around and i am currently running the latest bios from abit (bios #27) that has the buildin 4250 SiL 3112A upgrade included, i run the 1.051 SATARaid drivers for the controller in windows and i STILL get corrupt data when transferring from old to new HD (or new to old).
to sum up, data is OK when:
1. copying from partion 1 to partition 2 on HD A
2. copying from partion 1 to partition 2 on HD B
3: copying from Internet or CD to HD A or B
Data is bad when
1 Copying from HD A to B or B to A.
Now before i upgraded to the latest bios I did some testing and found out that if i copied closely to 1gig of data I would be 100% sure to get some bad in between. Eg not ALL data was corrupted just small things once in a while. Now after upgrading to the new BIOS I can hardly copy 50MB without getting corrupt data
and the bios was supposed to fix the corruption problem.
I have also tried to set that timer in the periphal part of the BIOS to 1ms (it was 30micro deault) to no avail (except that copying seems a bit slower now).
I Hope some of you in here have a suggestion for what I have forgotten to upgrade or some possible solution, because I am almost ready to spend 80$ on a decent Promise SATA controller :bawling:
edit: If this is the wrong forum feel free to move it and send me a PM on the location, I posted it in here because it seems to be a BIOS/Driver problem and not really a hardware problem.
I own a NF7-S 2.0 motherboard (with the 3112A controller) and had a single SATA 200gb WD HD in it until a week ago, then i put in an extra SATA 250WD and suddenly started to notice bad data occuring. Now before somone suggest upgrade bios etc I HAVE looked around and i am currently running the latest bios from abit (bios #27) that has the buildin 4250 SiL 3112A upgrade included, i run the 1.051 SATARaid drivers for the controller in windows and i STILL get corrupt data when transferring from old to new HD (or new to old).
to sum up, data is OK when:
1. copying from partion 1 to partition 2 on HD A
2. copying from partion 1 to partition 2 on HD B
3: copying from Internet or CD to HD A or B
Data is bad when
1 Copying from HD A to B or B to A.
Now before i upgraded to the latest bios I did some testing and found out that if i copied closely to 1gig of data I would be 100% sure to get some bad in between. Eg not ALL data was corrupted just small things once in a while. Now after upgrading to the new BIOS I can hardly copy 50MB without getting corrupt data
and the bios was supposed to fix the corruption problem.I have also tried to set that timer in the periphal part of the BIOS to 1ms (it was 30micro deault) to no avail (except that copying seems a bit slower now).
I Hope some of you in here have a suggestion for what I have forgotten to upgrade or some possible solution, because I am almost ready to spend 80$ on a decent Promise SATA controller :bawling:
edit: If this is the wrong forum feel free to move it and send me a PM on the location, I posted it in here because it seems to be a BIOS/Driver problem and not really a hardware problem.
0
Comments
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=1
But remember it's only when i Copy from drive A to drive B i get data errors, not from spot 1 to spot 2 on either drive A or B
edit: To avoid more questions like these, I got enogh power 430W TruePower. My cpu temp is roughly 50C and the motherboard (ambient) temp is near 30C and both HD have temps between 30 and 40 on last test.
Memory 2x512 corsair dualchannel, cpu 2500+ Barton @ 1883Mhz.
Edit2: TheSmJ as you have 2 harddrives and the same Motherboard as me could you give me the version numbers of bios and important drivers you use? then I can try that setup and see if it works (I am desperate).
And I currently do not run raid as i have just gotten the new HD (and i just need the new disk as storage)
in my case, scandisk checked out and so did all my hardware, I've been peachy ever since
You NEED to (and want to) check your memory using memtest86 (a free tool, very easy to use). Memory is very volitale, and can get crummy even though it's been fine for years. Please, download and run Memtest, and don't consider your memory "good" until Memtest can pass it at least 5 times with no errors (not even one).
But It would be a very odd memory failure even IF the memory was bad as I can use the pc normally in all ways. I can download data from the net to disk1 or disk2 i can rip audio cd's to either disk (i got a program that rips to memory then encodes to disk so I am sure it passes the RAM). I CANNOT however copy data from disk 1 to disk 2 without getting corrupt data, and since SI know they have a problem with corrupt data when 2 or more hardrives is attatched I ofcourse suspect that as being the culprit.
Right now I am wishing that i cahsed out the extra $$ and got myself the external disk I thought about getting instead.
Does anyone have experience with using the SATA to IDE converter that follows with the motherboard? I tried to plug it in but the Hd did not get recognised and i would like to try to have one of my drives on the IDE drive just to try to see if that should stop the error (and thus marking the controller as the fault) since i don't want to get a new controller before being absolutely certain that it's at error.
Thanks for the help so far though.
There were some data corruption issues with the initial release of WinXP and HD's > 128GB. These were fixed with SP1.
Just a thought.
And I meant from sata to pata, not pata to sata like you apparently use.
Guess I won't find any solution anytime soon
i have a nf7-s v2.0 board......i am thinking of buying a seagate 120gb sata drive...
but i see that there are a lot of people having problems with sata on this board....
so should i get sata drive or get simple pata drive????
As long as i only have 1Hd connected to the controller everything works like a charm. And since SATA discs usually are faster than PATA discs I would go for a SATA one.
I have the same issues as Oxxy describes in the first message. Data corruption occurs if copying between two SATA drives, in my case 160GB Maxtor and 250GB Hitachi Deskstar. Of course the MB is the same NF7-S rev2.0, bios 27. I have tested the same drives and cables in an Intel based system and there was no corruption. So it must be either the controller or the mobo's fault.
Does anyone have experience with Abit support? Do they reply to e-mails?
Priit
I bought two new WD2500 drives and now, whenever I copy data from CD -> HDD, it's fine (ex: installing Windows), but whenever I copy from one HDD to another, about 50% of the time it becomes corrupt (even on smaller files).
I've tried using the "stable" drivers for the SI controller from Abit's web site, as well as .50 and .51 from SI, nothing seems to be working. Obviously a problem with the controller, but I've also heard through a little searching that the chipset has a difficult time supporting 8MB caches on some of these drives. Either way, I suppose buying a Promise card would be a smart investment. SI seems way too flaky.
*** FIGURED OUT A SOLUTION ***
Change the EXT-P2P setting in your BIOS from 30 microseconds to 1 milisecond. You will take a hit on performance, but at least your data will not be corrupt!
Thanks a bunch for the help people.