Troubles connecting 2 SATA Drives

[tanwen]

Hi all,
This is a problem I've been struggling with for a day or two, and it's only now becoming apparent that this is a problem thats lots of you have had, but I've yet to find a definitive solution.

My friend has a Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro motherboard, and I recently fitted a brand new Hitachi 7K250 40GB SATA drive, which works perfectly. Enter 2nd 7K250 40GB SATA drive, connect it up, and.....2nd drive not seen in BIOS by the Sil chipset and Windows XP fails to boot. Remove the 2nd drive, and everything is ok again.

Now, I put this 2nd drive into my PC, which is a Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2 and its detected fine. I've not tried connecting 2 SATA drives into my PC.

We've tried swapping cables, swapping connectors and nothing makes any difference.

In my research I've found numerous problems from NCQ drives not working with Non-NCQ controllers, to Sil chipsets having known problems and so on.

Help ! lol. Can anyone out there help with this frustrating problem. Does anyone know of a compatibility list of SATA drives with SATA controllers or motherboards ? Does anyone know what this problem is ?

...and just so no one responds with "Have you made sure WindowsXP has the SATA drivers installed"...this has nothing to do with Windows, the problem lies much further back at the controller not seeing the 2nd SATA drive.

Thanks
Mike

 

[patio]

Try the known good drive on SATA 2 by itself...Does this change anything ? ?
That SATA 2 slot could be bad.

patio.

 

[tanwen]

Yep tried that, and the working drive works in both connectors.

I've even tried another cable, just in case it was the cable, and that made no difference (ie the working drive works with either connector and either cable).

One thought sprung to mind, was to ensure the motherboards BIOS was uptodate, however I've read somewhere that the BIOS update on Gigabyte motherboards doesn't update the SATA controller ship, so if the fault lies with that, then a BIOS upgrade won't help.

I'm tempted to buy a PCI SATA Controller card from Promise to be honest.