[picfreak]

OK, first off I'm new here and have read through alot of the threads and answers posted here and felt right at home.

So here's my challenge for you guys cause I'm about 24 hours from turning my motherboard into an expensive frisbee

System is:

P4 2.4C Ht
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
ATI X800 Pro AGP 8x
(Secondary-running 3 monitors) Geforce 3 PCI
1.024mb DDR400 Ram
WD 120Gb 7200 w 8mb
2x LG DVD burner roms

Here's the problem, the stupid thing won't run more than 3 ide devices at any given time (only two if I try and hook up two hard drives).

With just one hard drive the machine recognizes 2 cdroms, if I try and attach a third it won't recognize it. I am trying to format and have alot of data to transfer so I tried using my backup harddrives (one at a time, ones WD 30Gb and one Maxtor 40gb). This is when I really started to notice the problems. I run, upgrade and modify 8 pc's at work without so much as a hitch. This has stumped me. As soon as I attached the 2 hard drives both my rom's disappeared. When I attached only one of them one rom disappeared. When I attached the other by itself no rom's seen. When I unattached one rom neither was seen. When I unattached both rom's will only recognize two harddrives.

Confusing sounding I know, but nothing has helped this maximum of 3 ide's at a time issue. These drives are not recognized in bios, hardware profiles, xp, nowhere.I had original version of Bios, upgraded to newest on net (forgot number, think it's 2.1), then downgraded to the .19 version. Nothing changed. Added and removed my maxtor PCI expansion card, nothing. changed all cables (i have a boxload), checked connections (the roms do flash and run on startup, just not recognized), tried moving everything from cable select to primary/slave etc, nothing. Everything has been tested in my old 700 system., all works fine with my old motherboard configured standard. I even went so far as to thinking maybe my power supply is being to pushed (460) so I disconnected my second video card, changed/removed my ram one strip at a time, i am even using a second power supply now to run fans and roms so all the default power is required for is motherboard, cpu, ram, videocard, and two hard drives.

I am seriously considering taking everything out and throwing this piece of junk as far as possible. Am I missing something? All newest drivers installed on my hardware, Norton anti-virsu 2005 runnung, spybot ran once a week, XP fully updated. Help!

Ryan

 

[dai]

see if onboard eide is set to enhanced mode in the bios,read that section of your manual and see what it says

 

[picfreak]

Hey, thanks for the fast reply...

I was about to say no, I tried setting it to compatibility mode on the original bios, but then I flashed it twice since then so I went and checked it's status. Enhanced mode was back on as default and tried setting compatibility mode again just to see what would happen. Since one of the drives is now set on same cord path as my primary and the rom's are set on second path (not using expansion card again) I figured it may help. Anyhow, all I get right now with one extra drive hooked up and two roms is the two drives, no roms. I unhooked one of the roms again and suddenly the second one shows up again. I tell you, this board won't let me use more than 3 ide devices. It is wierd.

Any other suggestions I may have overlooked out of straight frusteration?

 

[UncleMacro]

The first thing I'd do is clear the CMOS in case I screwed up something. It's best to start from a clean slate. My main machine has a P4C800-E deluxe and I have the following configuration:
2 IDE hard disks on PRI_IDE using master/slave jumpers rather than cable select
2 IDE DVD drives on SEC_IDE using master/slave jumpers rather than cable select
1 SATA hard disk on SATA1 when the drive's not flaking out

I'm running a rather old 1014 BIOS. (Don't fix it unless it's broke and it ain't broke).
I checked IDE Configuration in the BIOS and I have:
Onboard IDE Operate Mode = Enhanced Mode
Enhanced Mode Support On = S-ATA
Configure S-ATA RAID = NO
My Promise RAID controller is disabled.

 

[picfreak]

Well, I reset once more the bios to default, then went through and made sure it matched yours.. I changed all jumper settings to master /slave as required and same problem.

I pulled the battery and cleared cmos last night before trying my third bios flash and attached only my primary hard drive and one cdrom on initial boot. Then added second cdrom, all was fine (as was my initial setup for this computer). I then crossed my fingers and tried a second hard drive again and once more lost my cdrom's. disconnected my second hard drive and they came back. Switched hard drives same problem. Disconnected one cdrom and one of the two hard drives appeared with the one remaining cdrom. All this was done on first second and third bios flashes with default and modified settings :4-dontkno . I'm shutting her down for the night and pulling the battery again.. I'd go and buy a damn external firewire and forget it if it wasn't for the fact that this motherboard is supposed to be able to handle without any third party hardware 4 ide devices (with or without SATA devices attached as well). I just can't let it go without a fight!

I'll check in at morning time and hopefully the problem will be fixed, somehow I have a sinking feeling though...

 

[jonss]

Try this. In bios; Compatible mode. then set it to pata ports only. If that does'nt work; Compatible mode, pata and sata. One of those should work. Enhanced mode is mainly for setting up a raid stripe. The bios settings on this whole family of mb's is critical.

Jon

 

[picfreak]

Compatible mode, pata and sata.Compatible mode. then set it to pata ports only.

tried both of these configurations previously, the Compatible mode, pata and sata resulted me originally being able to see the second harddrive with just one cdrom. The other made the hard drive disappear again (same result as enhanced mode). Unfortunately, once I attached second cdrom both of them disappeared yet again.

But, I did retry clearing cmos and this time...
voila! I now have two hard drives and two roms recognized and working. I feel it may be the expansion card that cause the issue. Last cmos clearing I reinstalled the expansion card (w/ nothing attached to it) before checking to see if it would recognize all my hardware. I have three drives I want to attach and 3 roms, I'm going to try this one last time with the card and see if it screws up everything again. At least then I'll know not to use it.

I thank you for the help and suggestions, kept me from throwing away a piece of hardware that was still fully functioning, just needed a "smack". I will check in after reinstalling everything (including windows) adn tell you what happened.

 

[linderman]

Welcome to the forum:

Bios flashing ?????

Any bios flashing from version 1019 and above must be done with AFUDOSmethod according to asus website & make sure you download the newer afudos off the asus website for you mobo.

you will need to have a DOS helper to get afudos to work / go to bootdisk.com and download the second item on the webpage (driverles bios utility) its called DRDFLASH downlaod it then run that utility with a clean NEW floppy in your floppy drive / then just copy the afudos program and new bios file to the prepared floppy and follow rest of instructions in mobo manual

regards

joe

 

[picfreak]

To flash the bios on my P4C800-E Deluxe:

I upgraded ASUSLiveupdateand then flashed BIOS with the flash bios button (just had to download version I wanted). Took about 5 minutes each time.

So far no problems from that and no floppy required!