asus p5q pro not recognising harddrives

yesterday i had some motherboard trouble, where it refused to post. after removing it from my case and just running it bare i got it to post, but now i', having problems with it recognising my harddrives. i've got a blank 160GB WD harddrive and a 250GB WD harddrive with my OS on. it's picked up in the bios, and in the post information screen, but after that the next screen (i forget what it's called, but it's after the american industries post screen logo (or asus p5q pro logo screen)

with my main OS harddrive, after claiming there's no harddrive it then goes to the windows start menu (start in safe mode?), then loads, then hangs and restarts.

i've got an official windows vista ultimate setup disc (which incidentally i've never used to install ultimate...) and when i put that in it loads the setup file (reads my IDE optical drive, but doesn't find a harddrive). it either blue screens or hangs with a low resolution mouse.

i've googled all over the place and the only lead i had was "disabling marvell IDE controllers". i don't know how to do that (or whether i've done that already), but i've tried in the bios with IDE mode, ACHI mode and RAID mode. IDE mode displays the express gate menu, but the others don't give me anything at all.

i've tried all SATA ports, the red ones (intel controllers) and not red ones (marvell ones) - i get errors on all of them. any ideas? this weekend just isn't my lucky day...

thanks in advance

have you tried the HD's on another computer to make sure they work?

VERY simple:

Switch SATA ports.

When you reconnected them, you probably connected them to the first two SATA ports... which will not work for some odd reason... Which HAVEN'T worked on any board I've had since the P965 days...

Just switch ports and you'll be fine.

I see somebody posting about this about once a week.

rain,
he said he tried all SATA ports, if he tried all of them, it sounds like a dead drive(s).

rainless said:

VERY simple:

Switch SATA ports.

When you reconnected them, you probably connected them to the first two SATA ports... which will not work for some odd reason... Which HAVEN'T worked on any board I've had since the P965 days...

Just switch ports and you'll be fine.

I see somebody posting about this about once a week.

Click to expand...

Yeah had this problem last night with my brother in law P5Q Pro. He plugged using the two far right sata port which I believe is the Marvell until I moved it to sata1 and 2 the one left of it in order for it to recognized.

my harddrives are working fine. i managed to get a system boot by turning off the ide controller (where the raid settings are), and after plugging the harddrives into the white or orange sata ports (the ones that originally never worked).

but it would only boot if there was 2GB of ram. i'm beginning to think it must be my ram - i'll try booting with the red sata ports with 2GB ram.

is there a pre windows test i can do to make sure my ram is working properly? i'm trying to eliminate all possible errors.

so irritating... i've been reduced to a laptop