hey i have a gigabyte nforce3 250gb.

i've only now switched to a serial ata 500gb drive.

i've had trouble booting from the disk. can someone tell me if i need to get a new motherboard(umart dont stock the 939 boards now)

or should i just format the disk to less than 250 gb


cheers
thanks adam

Hey mate

when you say booting, what do you mean? can you get into bios ok? does it detect the 500gig as a 500gig? Was your previous drive sata too? If not, is your sata controller turned on in bios? Have you tried a bios update?

last edited by Mr Hardware at 20:08:25 26/Jan/08

The capacity of the disk shouldn't make a diff...

Possible that the board may not be SATA2 compliant and you may have to jumper the drive to force SATA 1.5
http://www.seagate.com/images/support/en/us/cuda_sata_block.gif
Seagates are usually jumpered at 1.5 from factory nowdays, earlier ones weren't and WD drives use conventional jumpers.

Gonna need more info on "trouble booting" though.

last edited by rubba-chikin at 20:15:54 26/Jan/08

hey rc

yeh its a WD. sata2. the board only has sata 1 ithink. its a gigabyte k8nsc-939nf3-250gb

i'm trying to put on xp. it goes thru the first part of the install ok it detects the drive during the install but when it goes to the 2nd bit where it has to boot from the drive it has a disk boot failure.

it seems to detect fine thru the bios etc yeh and everything mostly seems to be working fine

yeh i think the jumper setting may fix it though my drive has 2 rows of four pins :)

The other thing it could be AD is if you have the disk connected to the jmicron sata controller on your board (a lot of gigabyte boards have this secondary io chip). This chip needs a driver for WinXP to work.

Gigabyte normally colour-code their sata ports. If there are two different colours for your sata ports then try the other colour. Very simple explanation :)

yeah i ended up using the 150 jumper setting and i changed the sata cable to the other mobo connection.

running smoothly now sweet!

Those gigabyte boards s*** me off.

The later ones with giga-raid (purple ports) are not properly compatible for whatever reason with the latest WD harddrives.

They still work but performance is absolutely s*** slow compared to the orange ports.

I once had this super pedantic customer whine about it taking 5 mins to boot windows, and even after swapping the board to a newer one at his demand it still did it. Swap HDD to the orange ports and boots nice and fast. Seagates work fine on either.