Question ASRock X58 SuperComputer and SATA compatible mode ?

[matti157]

TL;DR If I set the SATA controller to compatible mode (ide emulation), the controller still sees an attached hard drive but cannot access it. It can only access the CD drive.


Hello,
I am booting MSDOS on this motherboard, via the built-in floppy controller.
The manual recommends setting the sata controller to "compatible" mode.
By doing so, the SATA1 port becomes the primary IDE master and SATA3 becomes the primary IDE slave.

In SATA1 I connected a hard disk drive, in SATA3 the CD drive.

I boot DOS via floppy and the CD drive is recognized correctly and works (if I leave the SATA controller in enhanced mode its use in DOS and derivatives is impossible).

The hard disk, on the other hand, is recognized but it is impossible to access it:
-When booting when the bios looks for the operating system to run, the moment the hard disk is accessed the motherboard freezes for about 60 seconds and then continues to the secondary boot device. During this time the hard disk access light is always on.

-When the DOS boot is run, if I run FDISK I get the usual 60 second freeze with always on light and then the message "error reading fixed disk"

I have tried with:
-recent SSD
- "ancient" SSD... OCZ from 2011
-Mechanical HDD

It really seems that the SATA controller set to "compatible" mode cannot access the hard disk.
What other option should I set in the BIOS? It seems impossible to me that this mode does not work. Are there any special tricks?

I have tried with both BIOS 1.70 and 3.40.

Thanks

 

[jojesa]

Which DOS version?
What's the size of the boot partition on the disk?

 

[matti157]

Which DOS version?
What's the size of the boot partition on the disk?

DOS 6.22
I like to experiment and saw that someone have developed drivers for x58 for Windows 98, so I am using the boot floppy to install it (which boots a version of DOS)

Then in the wreckage I had a natively supported 3com etherlink PCI and an ATI X800 which is a pci express card compatible with win 98, so why not try what comes out? 😬😬😬

The last HDD connected has a 1024mb FAT16 partition, with MBR scheme. I did it via gparted on Ubuntu, just to test if the problem was the partition.

 

[matti157]

Anyway TL;DR If I set the SATA controller to compatible mode (ide emulation), the controller still sees an attached hard drive but cannot access it. It can only access the CD drive.

 

[matti157]

Solved, just set from BIOS the hard disk's DMA mode to "SWDMA" (single word dma)



I wonder why...