Seagate Serial ATA Problem

[Alzo]

Hi,
Just built a new system: MB - Chaintech 7NJS Ultra Zenith, HDD - Seagate Barracuda 80GB SATA HDD (Promise Fastrack BIOS). HDD installed ok with WINXP.

System works fine except for annoying glitch. Symptoms:
1 - After first boot (when machine has been off for some time, e.g. overnight)the machine hangs with XP still running).
2 - After soft restart, Fastrack BIOS (FB) fails to recognise HDD.
3 - After hard (pwr off) restart FB recognises HDD but WINXP boot hangs.
4 - After several hard resets WINXP finally boots up.

After this annoyance, the machine works fine for hours!!

Can anyone suggest a solution, as this is driving me mad!!

 

[tjchino]

maybe test the memory or adjust memory settings?

 

[Alzo]

Thanks for your reply.

Seagate support have suggested this also. Do you mean altering the memory settings (frequency) in the BIOS and using a diagnostic tool in WINXP?

 

[tjchino]

adjust timings in bios (make them bigger not smaller). the diagnostic tool is something you'll have to download somewhere else and put on a floppy disk. i believe it is called Memtest86 or something like that.

 

[lunitic]

check for newest drivers & bios on the chaintech website, this seems to me a driver problem. If there aren't any yet and your drive is a new model then check again in a couple of days. If your promise controler is a PCI model (not integrated on the mobo) check the promise website for bios & driver updates.

 

[advent]

I would advise to check the cables. I had a lot of problems with HDDs beeing not recognized by the Fasttrack, and touching the connectors then helped. I feel like SATA connectors are quite bad because they can move horizontally a lot.