HDD problems with new A8N-SLI Deluxe

I received my A8N-SLI Deluxe today, and installed it without a problem, until I went to boot it up for the first time. I got the "Error loading operating system" error. The HDD is a Maxtor 120GB SATA.

I reinstalled windows, formatted, fixmbr, same error. The bios is autodetecting CHS, and I read that changing it to LBA would fix the problem. There is an option in the IDE settings for it, however, there is no LBA option for my SATA drive; it only shows [Auto] and [Large]. Large doesn't work, it hangs after making some of the letters on the screen colorful.

My question is, is it possible to manually set LBA mode for a SATA drive on this mobo? Or am I overlooking something obvious?

Expanding the information from the previous post, the drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, SATA 150 (120GB). Access mode set to [Auto] picks CHS, ATA 133, instead of what I'm guessing to be correct LBA, ATA 150.

I've changed pretty much every setting, nothing happens other than Error loading operating system.

I still don't understand why, if the HDD utilities and the WinXP recovery console can both read/write to the disk just fine under CHS, it won't boot.

Before I reformatted I had GRUB with SuSE 9.1 Personal/WinXP dual config. GRUB would load, but neither XP nor SuSE would boot.

The auto detection error was fixed somewhere along the line, because updating my BIOS to 1003.005 (Beta) fixed the problem. It booted up and detected LBA without a problem. Doesn't seem to be any way to manually set access mode on a SATA drive on this motherboard.. quite irritating, I never really trust auto detection

So, recap, if you have a Maxtor and get this board, you might get an Error loading operating system error, but a newer bios fixes it. You don't need to reformat, zero fill, fixmbr, or any of that jazz Making a boot disk with awdflash.exe and the new bios image before you install might be a good idea, however.

CaelStar1 said:

The auto detection error was fixed somewhere along the line, because updating my BIOS to 1003.005 (Beta) fixed the problem. It booted up and detected LBA without a problem. Doesn't seem to be any way to manually set access mode on a SATA drive on this motherboard.. quite irritating, I never really trust auto detection

So, recap, if you have a Maxtor and get this board, you might get an Error loading operating system error, but a newer bios fixes it. You don't need to reformat, zero fill, fixmbr, or any of that jazz Making a boot disk with awdflash.exe and the new bios image before you install might be a good idea, however.

Click to expand...

thankyou for the info,

My AN8-SLI should be here by the end of this week and I'll definately keep that in mind!


OC-Master