Mobo problem...

[hottie_parms]

I just bought an ECS P4m800PRO-M v2.0

I heard it sucked, but it was a really good deal (E6600 and the mobo for $199)...

Anyway, here's the deal. When I boot, the computer freezes while it's still in POST. Here's what's happened:

It auto-detects my two DVD drives, as it should, and then it auto-detects my hard drive. Here's what it says in the process:

3rd Master: ST3250823AS 3.03
Ultra DMA Mode-6, S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status OK

And after this appears, the computer hangs, forcing a manual restart. I have not been able to get past this point, without removing the hard drive.

When I remove the hard drive, the computer boots normally, and can boot off of CD's and other (IDE) hard drives. However, it hangs on this SATA drive. I went into the BIOS and changed the UDMA mode to force 6, 5, and even 4, disabled S.M.A.R.T. and even forced the PIO to 4 (which the mobo detected the drive to use).

Now, I don't have any other SATA drives to test this out on, so it could very well be my hard drive, but I pulled this hard drive out of my old AMD64 machine, and it was running just perfectly at the time. And the mobo IS detecting it, which hasn't happened when HD's died on me in the past.

I've cleared CMOS a few times to try that, and it didn't work. I even took out all of the components except the bare minimum (DDR1 RAM, HD, proc). Nothing seems to work!

Do you think it's a problem with the onboard SATA? I'm planning on updating the BIOS tonight, but I need to get some floppies from work to do this. Have any of you seen something like this before?

Thanks! I noticed a lot of posts about this board, but didn't see anything specifically relating to this problem, so I created a new post. I'm new here.. ;-)

UPDATE:

I've discovered that when I disable LBA mode in the BIOS, it's able to start the bootup process. However, it can't load the OS because LBA is disabled and the drive is too big without it...

 

[hottie_parms]

I came in to this prepared to reinstall Windows, however the problem comes before the boot process even begins. It detects the hard drive, but just hangs afterwards, without giving an error message.

When I throw in an old IDE hard drive that had a copy of XP on it, I at least got a blue screen when it tried to load Windows.

 

[hottie_parms]

The problem here is that in order to get past the post, I have to disconnect the hard drive or disable LBA, neither of which really make the hard drive readable (I thought LBA was needed for large capacity hard drives? Correct me if I'm wrong)

 

[Mousemonkey]

If your mobo is using the VIA VT8235 chipset then give up Dude 'cos it aint gonna work regardless of anything VIA or ECS say if its got a different southbridge chipset ie not a VIA one then there may be a solution, I don't know what that solution might be but I do know that the VT8235 chipset on an ECS board dislikes S-ATA with a passion.

 

[walcirw]

Hi,

In my case, I discovered that any USB device conected to this mobo on startup make it very, VERY slow.
I had a USB mouse conected to it and just disconecting it, boot was as fast as any other normal mobo...
Tried with other devices (pen drive) and had the same problem...

ECS sucks !