SATA2 Drive in PIO mode

jabaroon

Hi all,

I recently purchased a Maxtor SATA2 300gb drive for my Dell XPS600. For some reason, its only operating in PIO mode. When I open up the "nForce4 Serial ATA RAID Controler" properties under device manager, my primary device (250gb that shipped with the dell) is saying "Serial ATA Generation1 - 1.5G". The Secondardy Channel tab says "PIO Mode" and there is a little windows warning icon that says "Transfer Mode Downgraded".

I have attempted to set the PIO mode to SATA2 and SATA1, but each time when I reboot, the machine hangs part way through the reboot and I have to revert to "last known good setting" to get the machine to boot again.

Im stumped by this one.

Naturally, dell support are completely unwilling to help as I didnt purchase the second drive from them. However, I am sure that the problem is not with the drive because I have tried TWO separate drives (a SATA1 and a SATA2) and both always end up in PIO mode.

I have also tried connecting the drive to different SATA connectors on the motherboard, but the result is always the same!

All help and suggestions gratefuly recieved!
Ta,
Jab

leeroybrown

Check the jumper settings for the drive online and see if there is one that sounds sensible. I've previously had to jumper a SATA drive to get it to be detected properly.

jabaroon

leeroybrown wrote:

Check the jumper settings for the drive online and see if there is one that sounds sensible. I've previously had to jumper a SATA drive to get it to be detected properly.

Yeah, I thought of that. On the back of the drive there are 4 pins that can be jumpered.

2 of them are jumpered closed permanently (with a jumper that cant be reoved). The second pair are open, but closing them downgrades the SATA2 drive to a SATA1 drive. As yet, I havent done this as I dont have a jumper small enough (the pins are tiny!).

However, I am somewhat confident (possibly incorrectly so!) that this is not the problem, unless of course someone can tell me that there is generally problems / issues if you have a SATA1 drive as the primary boot device and a SATA2 as a slave?

Cheers,
Jab

greglo23

i had a similar problem when i installed my sata 2 drive on my Asrock board. after i downloaded new sata 2 drivers it worked perfectly so maybe your missing the drivers for it ? just a suggestion !

anothervictim

Try reinstalling the driver via device manager.

astrofool

u have installed the nVidia drivers?

If you haven't, try it, if you have, uninstall the ide drivers section via add/remove programs. They are known to give problems such as the boot up problem you described.

Also, update the bios to the latest version, and make sure to download all drivers from the hardware manufacturers site, NOT the dell site, as they are usually out of date (www.nvidia.com for u).

8T8

As was mentioned try the jumpers first but also check the bios make sure the SATA controller is running in compatibility mode in the bios.

I''d also try updating drivers first to see if the problem is resolved (do install the IDE drivers) and then if that doesn't fix it remove the IDE driver and roll back to the "standard dual channel PCI IDE controller" driver.

Latest Intel nForce 4 drivers

Finally be aware that maxtor have compatibility issues with nForce 4 motherboards a fix is available from them.

formatman

Windows XP makes a registry change when it isn't sure what mode to set a drive to ( for PATA drives anyhow ) resulting in this issue

Say this lots of times with PATA drives and solved it by removing the controller in device manager and restarting ,

How many SATA connectors are on the motherboard ( 2 or 4 ? )

jabaroon

8T8 wrote:

As was mentioned try the jumpers first but also check the bios make sure the SATA controller is running in compatibility mode in the bios.

I''d also try updating drivers first to see if the problem is resolved (do install the IDE drivers) and then if that doesn't fix it remove the IDE driver and roll back to the "standard dual channel PCI IDE controller" driver.

Latest Intel nForce 4 drivers

Finally be aware that maxtor have compatibility issues with nForce 4 motherboards a fix is available from them.

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. Results as follows:

- have upgraded to the latest nForce drivers. Was a little tricky to do as upgrading them without first upgrading the bios resulted in a BSOD during windows bootup (pain!). Once drivers were updated, tried deleting the disk from device manager and rebooting. Unfortunatley, the same problem occurred, windows simply hung part way through the boot-up process.

- Next step was to roll back to last known good config and start reading 8T8's post regarding possible SATA/nForce/Maxtor compatibility issues. Interestingly, my drive firmware version is listed on the link provided as being one of the potentially effected drives (grrrr!). So, have send a support request to Maxtor and will let you all know how I get on.

Once again, thanks for alll of the help,
Cheers,
Jab