PCI Sata w/Asus A7N8X-E MoBo Problem

[nightwind]

The pins on my Asus A7N8X-E MoBo on-board SATA connection literally fell apart on one of the connectors so, rather than buying a new MoBo, I bought a PCI SATA board with two internal connectors. Now when I boot up, it gets to the point just before recognizing the SATA fdrives and then the screen goes blank and I get a blinking dash in the upper left corner. If I pull the PCI board, It goes all ther way to Windows using my IDE HHD. Before the MoBo SATA connector went south, It recognized my IDE & both SATA drives with no problem. Any Help???

 

[mailpup]

Did you install the driver for the card?

 

[nightwind]

It's my understanding that the drivers do not come into play until Windows XP starts to load. This seems to happen during bios. If the PCI card is not insatalled, then it goes to the usual SATA/Raid screen that searches for the SATA HDDs. If the PCI card is installed, then it goes to the blinking dash instead of the SATA/Raid screen. However, if it ever got that far, the SATA drivers are installed in Windows XP

 

[DragonFury]

have u tried diffrent pci slots ? there could be a conflict from the onboard sata to the card try disabling the onboard .

 

[Justin]

The pins on my Asus A7N8X-E MoBo on-board SATA connection literally fell apart on one of the connectors so, rather than buying a new MoBo, I bought a PCI SATA board with two internal connectors. Now when I boot up, it gets to the point just before recognizing the SATA fdrives and then the screen goes blank and I get a blinking dash in the upper left corner. If I pull the PCI board, It goes all ther way to Windows using my IDE HHD. Before the MoBo SATA connector went south, It recognized my IDE & both SATA drives with no problem. Any Help???

In BIOS, make sure you disable the onboard controller. The A7N8X-E uses a SiL chipset, and if you plug in a PCI card that uses the same chipset, it often has issues. On my file server at home, I ended up getting around the problem on my secondary SiL card by enabling RAID mode on the onboard controller. Others have had luck with disabling it outright.

 

[nightwind]

Sounds very reasonable but how do I disable the onboard controller? I bought it from New Egg as a refurb and it didn't come with a manual.

 

[nightwind]

Tried three of the five PCI slots. I'm starting to think it's having an issue between the on-board and PCI controllers but I don't know how to disable the on-board SATA contoller. BTW, if I connect a SATA HHD to the remaining on-board SATA connector, it also goes south and stalls at the point where it tries to figure out what HDD I'm using. Think maybe the MoBo is trying to figure out what happened to the other connector that fell apart??