SATA DVD not found in BIOS though SATA HDD is

[Haydnc]

Hi,
My wife's PC has a Gigabyte GA-8VM800M-775 motherboard that uses the VIA VN8x0/CN7x0 chipset and the VT8237R southbridge. The mobo has two SATA connectors - SATA0 and SATA1. I have a Maxtor 320Gb SATA HDD drive connected to SATA0. If it's connected to SATA1, howver, it's not found in the BIOS or in Windows (XP Pro). The BIOS Serial ATA switch is set in the BIOS to "Enabled" and as I have only the one HDD drive, I installed the SATA driver when I first installed the Maxtor. The SATA type is set in the BIOS to "IDE" rather than "RAID".
I have replaced a Lite-On (IDE) CD-RW drive with an LG (SATA) DVD burner. If I remove the HDD and connect the DVD to SATA0, it is found in the BIOS without problem but connecting it to SATA1 doesn't, just like the HDD. I have installed the latest BIOS for this mobo and chipset drivers from Gigabyte's site but without success. I have also downloaded and installed new VIA drivers. The boot sequence is set to "HDD, CD, and Floppy" though one suggestion I found on the net was to reverse this - I've done so, without success. As there are no jumpers on the DVD or, equally, the Maxtor HDD, there's nothing on the drive to try tweaking. I went back through the mobo manual and there are no jumpers to tweak there either. All the drives are set in BIOS to "Auto".
To test a possibility, I purchased an Ultra ATA (IDE)/SATA connector - it fits into the IDE socket on the mobo but has two SATA outputs; SATA1 is one for a SATA mobo to parallel ATA HDD whilst SATA2 is for a parallel ATA mobo to a SATA HDD. Using this device with the SATA cable connecting the SATA2 output to the DVD drive and inserted into IDE1 socket on the mobo, it's found in IDE Channel 1 as a Master and works in XP OK, so it would appear to be a driver or BIOS related issue.
I tried installing the SATA driver for the new drive, but to be honest, don't know how successfully. I created a floppy with the required drivers on it, started the WinXP set up, entered 'F6' as soon as it started and after loading a series of third party files, it successfully found the VIA VT8237R controller. The required files were then allegedly installed but I didn't then proceed to re-instal Win XP as (a) I didn't want to reload it and (b) it didn't actually recognise the partition - it showed "unknown disk" but did get the size of the drive correct. Rather than lose all my data, I quit using F3. On re-boot, the drive is still not recognised within the BIOS. I've also tried finding the driver on the floppy, selecting the .sys file, right mouse clicked and selected "Instal". Something did appear to load but it hasn't made any difference.
I found one posting on this site that suggests the early version of the VT8237R doesn't natively support optical drives - but how does one tell? Is there a code I can look for? The other solution would be the SATA driver does need re-loading but if so, how does one do it without reloading WinXP entirely?
The obvious option is to use the new connector but I'd really prefer to get this working properly using the SATA1 socket connector. Anyone got any other suggestions or ideas I can try on how to get SATA1 turned on?
Thanks in advance.

[SaphireX]

Hi Haydnc

As you discovered the VT8237 & VT8237R chipsets do not support support SATA (Serial-ATAPI) DVD Optical drives. Using an Ultra ATA (IDE)/SATA connector - that fits into the IDE socket on the mobo to connect your SATA DVD also is not a workable solution because it is simply incompatible with your Southbridge as well as the VIA VN8x0/CN7x0 chipset.

The solution is a PCI SATA/RAID card that supports DVD optical drives. Promise has a reasonably priced card that also is fully compatible with your boards chipset so that you can add that SATA DVD optical drive.

PROMISE SATA300 TX2plus PCI SATA / IDE Controller Card-2 SATA 3Gb/s Ports plus 1 Ultra ATA/133
Features Native Command Queuing(NCQ)
SATA Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)
Supports Serial ATAPI devices
Flexible future-proof upgrade for users with motherboards that only have a PCI interface

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816102064

Post back and please let us know what you decided to do and how the Promise Card is working out for you

Saphire

[Chetw]

So if it's incompatible, why does it work flawlessly under Windows XP (as mentioned in my initial thread)? The only thing that does not work is booting from it which to me seems easily fixable with a controller BIOS update given that all other functionality in addressing an optical device already seems to be there.

Besides, I think it's a shame that such a serious flaw isnt advertised anywhere on the product. If I do buy a board with SATA connectors, I expect it to run with SATA devices and not only a subset.

[SaphireX]

Short answer is not all hardware is compatible.

In your original thread you said that if your SATA hard drive was plugged into the SATA Port 0 with the SATA (Serial ATAPI) DVD drive plugged into SATA Port 1 and/or visa versa the hard drive was not detected properly but the SATA DVD was.

You tried using a IDE to SATA connector to add your DVD drive to that connectors Port2 and that apparently works "OK".

If it works O.K. then I am wondering why? you think you need driver support for your SATA DVD burner on the IDE to SATA connector?

As far as using the SATA DVD burner on the OnBoard SATA Port1 with the SATA hard drive on the OnBoard SATA port 0 as you discovered that simply won't work as the hard drive is no longer detected and initialized.

The fact that the SATA 2nd Gen standard came out after your board was manufacturered like all hardware updates very rarely is fully backwards compatible and to expect a Serial ATAPI ie: SATA DVD drive to work with a 1rst Gen SATA controller is wishful thinking but ignoring reality..........

Saphire

[Chetw]

I' wasn't aware that my english is that bad that's not what I wrote so I'm reiterating:

A)
SATA Port 0: HDD
SATA Port 1: DVD-RW

B)
SATA Port 0: DVD-RW
SATA Port 1: HDD

In BOTH cases BOTH devices work flawlessly under Win XP SP2. BUT in NEITHER case I'm able to boot from the optical drive.

Granted, expecting NCQ, AHCI and 3.0 Gbit/s with my old hardware would be wishful thinking but I do not need those features! I simply want to BOOT from my optical drive and if that is ignoring reality than there's no way to speak of backwards compatibility at all. Heck, I can use any current IDE writer and boot from it even when it's attached to my old Pentium 1/75Mhz board which doesn't "speak" U-DMA6.

[SaphireX]

"The SATA Frame structure is made up of multi Dwords, which are in turn encapsulated by flow control and CRC information. The SATA frame begins with a Start-of-frame [SOF]. The SOF is followed by the Frame Information Structure [FIS]. Then the Cyclic Redundancy Code [CRC] is placed in the frame. The final block in the message is an End-of-Frame [EOF]. SATA uses a 32bit CRC [calculated over the contents of a (FIS) Frame Information Structure], stored as the 'Dword'.
The 32-bit CRC polynomial is X32+ X26+ X23+ X22+ X16+ X12+ X11+ X10+ X8+ X7+ X5+ X4+ X2+ X + 1."

"SATA optical drives must support the ATAPI protocol with special decoding and triggering functions. In the future, CD/DVD drives designed for performance instead of low cost will become available with a SAS interface instead of ATAPI over SATA."



Best advice I can offer

Saphire

[Chetw]

So if the DVD-RW does not show up it's not an error of the VIA controller BIOS but of the mainboard's BIOS. Considering the other posters in my original thread there seem to be several boards out there which offer only rudimentary support for this technologies. I'm gonna contact Asrock support asking about a BIOS update and let you know what's what. Thanks for clearing that up.

[chrisjs]

Originally posted by: SaphireX

As you discovered the VT8237 & VT8237R chipsets do not support support SATA (Serial-ATAPI) DVD Optical drives. Using an Ultra ATA (IDE)/SATA connector - that fits into the IDE socket on the mobo to connect your SATA DVD also is not a workable solution because it is simply incompatible with your Southbridge as well as the VIA VN8x0/CN7x0 chipset.

The solution is a PCI SATA/RAID card that supports DVD optical drives. Promise has a reasonably priced card that also is fully compatible with your boards chipset so that you can add that SATA DVD optical drive.

PROMISE SATA300 TX2plus PCI SATA / IDE Controller Card-2 SATA 3Gb/s Ports plus 1 Ultra ATA/133
Features Native Command Queuing(NCQ)
SATA Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)
Supports Serial ATAPI devices
Flexible future-proof upgrade for users with motherboards that only have a PCI interface

Thanks for the useful posts everybody - now I can stop banging my head against the vt8237 wall.

Here in the UK the Promise cards don't seem to be available but there do seem to be quite cheap 1.5 Gb cards based on the Silicon Image 3112 chip. Can anybody comment on the compatibility of these cards? Has anybody been able to boot from their DVD using one of these?

Chris

[Chetw]

Incredible though it may seem the guys over at Asrock sent me a new BIOS which now supports booting from SATA optical drives. You can get it here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YLQXZJ0A

Booting now works flawlessly, DVD writing however doesn't [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img]

As I ALT-TAB out of ImgBurn to my webbrowser the burning aborts. Which is extra weird since I was only burning 8x from an USB2 attached drive. My system becomes kinda unresponsive similar to accessing a drive with DMA turned off or both writer and HDD being attached to the same IDE port.

You might yield better results with other writers so I suggest you give it a try.

[chrisjs]

Thanks for that Chetw.

Unfortunately I have an ASUS K8V-MX/S which is a rather old oem board made for Fujitsu-Siemans (aka D1711). There are some other threads on here giving links to bios updates for this board but they are all quite old and the board is not well supported.

I should probably have bought a PATA drive [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img]