Resolved old mobo sata woes

Hi just had fun getting a 1TB Samsung SATA hard drive running on my Asus A7n8X-D yesterday,got Windows XP booting and all set up lovely. Everything was fine but while things seemed quick but for some reason HDtach was reporting speeds of 15MB/S and and despite no obvious system speed sluggishness I expected far higher.
Decided to upgrade my SATA drivers and windows warned me they were not tested and could make things unstable (the originals failed logo testing during install) but I carried on anyway...
Now I can't boot into XP things get so far and the computer resets and obviously things are not any different in safe mode.

Sooo, can I boot up somehow and replace the updated driver file or will I have to start the install over?

 

Can I use the recovery console to copy the required inf file from a drive? Where would I find the windows location and is there anything else I would need to do?

 

In Safe Mode, Windows does not load any 3rd party driver. Only basic drivers are loaded. However if your BIOS is in SATA mode, SATA drivers would be loaded.

Just go into your BIOS & check whether hard disk is in IDE [Default] or SATA mode ? If its in SATA mode, switch it to IDE mode. That may solve your problem.

 

Not sure what you mean really, you mean boot order? Only mention of sata at all in my bios is scsi / sata order and that is not in the same menu as boot order. Also my sata drive does not appear in the bios it requires its own which starts immediately after the POST completes, where the drive is separately recognised. I think Windows does require these drivers regardless of safe mode because I have to use a disc during XP install.

I have an install on my previous IDE I could put the drive back in and boot to the old version of windows but this wouldn't give me access to the SATA hard drive, so a non option.

Unless I have misunderstood you my only option seems to be to somehow swap the original XP sil3112 drivers back using the command prompt in the windows recovery console but not sure where that will leave me with regards to registry settings etc.. And I don't know where to start looking for the installed sil driver!

Of course I could re-install but it takes me hours of messing to get XP set up just the way I like it!

 

Ah sorry no I can't, same problem. like I said I suspect windows still requires this driver to recognise the SATA controller even in safe mode.

 

Your motherboard is set to treat drives as proper SATA drives. This option is troublesome in some configuration.

In your BIOS, there should be some entry like SATA Mode or Hard Disk Emulation, most probably in Advanced Option. Change it to IDE. Now Windows would start treating these as normal PATA/IDE disks & would load internal drivers.

 

Hi rs definitely no such option .

This board is well known to not support sata as well as it should have done.

The only thing I can do to access the drive now is load the XP disk with the driver diskette and then go to recovery console or reinstall XP.

 

Just hold on. I am googling for your motherboard. Would get back to you with instructions.

 

Seems you are out of luck. This motherboard is pretty old [Socket A] & has Silicon Image SATA controller which works ONLY in SATA mode.

If you have the SATA drivers on a floppy, you can try Repair instead of full install.

 

Can you tell me where to look for the installed sata drivers within windows then I might us RC to copy the old driver across from disk drive and fingers crossed this might be enough..?

 

Copying the drivers may not be enough as Windows stores the configuration details in registry & hundred other places.

 

Thanks for your help RS. decided to re-install last night this time I installed the nforce IDE drivers which were left outlast time with an interesting result - now HDtach is showing 104mb/s (not sure if this is a true figure?) for the sata drive and windows loads in 1m29 according Soluto so I think that is respectable for an old mobo... However the IDE drives show and seem to behave at about 3mb/s lol. Once I get files transfered I will be happy though!

Thanks once again..

 

Good for you.

You should download & copy all the drivers from ASUS site for your board as this board has bee discontinued & ASUS may pull the plug for drivers at any time.

 

ok Pete sorting now..