GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Maybe.
Try booting with your WD250 as the only sata device and see if this setup causes a problem while booting.
Western Digital has several diagnostic tools that can be used to test any of their hard drives, using a floppy drive or an optical drive for the software. The problem might be due to a jumper block on one of the 8 pins on each sata drive that is fine with IDE but causes a problem with AHCI mode. You can download pdf documentation for each model drive that explains how the pins should or should not be jumpered.
If you haven't posted the full model number for the WD 640GB drive, post it an I'll look at documentation for both of your WD drives.

You obviously do NOT want to do any destructive hard drive testing or formatting.
If there is a problem with the WD250, you might need to boot using the IDE sata mode so that you can backup all of the data.

Your sata2 ports are labeled sata2_0, sata2_1, sata2_2, ..... through sata2_5.
Always use the sata2_0 port for your boot drive.
Your sata optical drive(s) should always be the on last or highest numbered sata ports, in this case, sata2_5.

Most of my hard drives are WD Caviar black drives, including 640, 750 and 1TB drives.

You're making good progress.

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Is your 640GB hard drive model number = WD6401AALS-00E3A0?

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

I just went and tried it with the master drive and nothing else connected but that and it got stuck at 23 again. I looked on the 640 and the 250 Caviars and they didn't seem to have any jumpers in them. I put the master drive in port 0 and the optical in port 5 now, thanks.

Is your 640GB hard drive model number = WD6401AALS-00E3A0?
It is WD6401AALS-00E8B0

I am currently running in IDE mode still, I really want to be in SATA though

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Both of your drives are sata drives, currently not running in AHCI mode. You get a bit more hard drive performance when running in AHCI mode, and a significant boost when you have an ssd as your boot drive that has 4k aligned partitions and runs in AHCI mode. I have a 128GB Samsung 830 o/s boot drive and all my data, media and other files are on my WD640 hard drive. For about $90 you can buy a decent 128GB ssd. My ssd upgrade made a huge difference with both of my older systems; P35-DS3L and N650SLI-DS4. Samsung ssd's have virtually no problems with the ssd suddenly not being recognized by the system. Check out the user reviews for ssd's at Newegg and you'll see that the Samsung ssd's have much higher ratings than and virtually no problems compared with other mainstream ssd's.

These are my ATTO benchmarks from my P35-DS3L system.
Look at the performance difference when I performed a 4k partition alignment, compared with non-aligned hard drive partitions:



from http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte...-capacity.html, post #44

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

That is amazing a huge boost in speed, wow. And I didn't know that they were so cheap now. I guess that I will try to get one in a few weeks. It is unfortunate that the HD has to be incompatible though. If I had not done a new installation I would still be able to have SATA working now.

This motherboard is obsolete now, too so I don't think that any of the bios engineers would even think about taking a look at this problem now.

Thanks for the help

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

You're welcome, but I'm not done yet.
Your system is an oldie but not moldy. Your mobo is one generation newer than my P35 and your cpu leaves mine in the dust.
Take a look at my SLI benchmark results with my MSI Hawk N460GTX video cards. I'm very close to newer systems with a similar gpu setup. The MSI Hawk thread link is in my signature. Haswell will out soon, probably by late spring or early to mid summer. I plan to build a nice higher end Haswell system and use my older systems as servers.

If you registered your WD250 hard drive, you should be able to get help from WD tech support, even if your drive is out of warranty. I'm going to check out the WD250 documentation to see if there is a way for your drive to work in AHCI mode with your mobo. There is an outside chance that Gigabyte tech support might already have a special bios version that deals with your AHCI issue; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Those are great results at 1080p with a dual core, really nice. The core 2 is still holding up it looks like. The Haswell will introduce 8 cores, right? Oh man that is going to be overkill performance. I hope to get a GTX 670, soon.

Thanks again for the help. I will check the Western Digital site, but I never really thought of registering them back then.

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

You're welcome, glad to help out.
Yep, I've got a real half-fast dual core system.

I've finished at the WDC site, but I didn't search through their Q & A tech section for possible answers.
I don't think that their tech support will help you unless you have registered your WD drive before you call them.
As long as you can backup your WD250, you might be able to run some serious hard drive diagnostics that might tell you if your drive is failing and if it dies during testing, you haven't lost any data.

Did you test your WD250 hdd with several different sata data cables and/or power cables?
I don't know why this might make a difference in AHCI mode only, but a failing cable could be the cause.
It's possible that the WD250 is failing, but seems to be OK for now when it's not connected via AHCI mode.
Go with a 128GB o/s ssd and breathe some new life into your system for less than $100. A 60 - 100GB o/s boot drive will fill up too quickly and ssd performance will start to lag at times and ssd life will be much shorter if you've filled the ssd to more than about 70%.
Absolutely do not buy an ssd that uses asynchronous NAND memory, no matter how much cheaper the price is.
Check out the bottom link in my signature to avoid saving a little money and buying an inferior ssd.

Intel doesn't need a true 8 core cpu to keep ahead of AMD as AMD still lags behind at the high end. AMD system prices are an excellent value for those who don't want to pay the extra dollars for the very highest end performance. I'm hoping that Intel will finally get their act together and provide a large number of Intel sata3 and usb3.0 controllers so that we don't have to mess with inferior performing controllers from ASMedia, Marvell, VIA, Etron and others. It's kind of like racing; how fast are you willing to spend?

I bought a Toshiba 3TB external usb 3.0 hard drive and added a HighPoint usb 3.0 controller card for additional backup storage. Performance as expected on my P35 wasn't great, but it's about as fast as an regular sata2 hard drive. My mobo only has 4 sata ports and usb 2.0 doesn't begin to cut it for large backups.

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Oh, okay so I will not get the NAND memory SSDs thanks for the advice. So samsung has the highest compatibility with gigabyte motherboards. I will make sure to choose that brand then when I'm able to buy next time.

I ran an extended diagnostics test with the western digital data lifeguard tool and checked for errors with defraggler on the 250 caviar and it passed both. I also tried 3 different sata cords including the yellow ones that were from the first EP43T-UD3L board that didn't have the incompatibilty problem, and the results were the same with the 23 error.

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

As far as I know, all ssd memory is referred to as NAND memory.
From post #1 in the ssd performance thread:

Bottom line, there is a modest price premium for the better performing synchronous drives, where the slightly less expensive asynchronous drives will often have only 50% - 66% of the performance of the synchronous NAND drives.

.... and ....

The bottom line:
asynchronous drives = inferior performance.
synchronous drives = superior performance.
Most ssd reviews that use toggle NAND have excellent performance.

See Flash memory - Wikipedia for more information. The information is quite technical at times.

Some ssd brands or models sometimes have issues where they are no longer recognized by the system. The problem appears to be mostly with Sandforce based drives, but you need to keep in mind that Sandforce drives have dominated market share for several years.

Register your WD250 hard drive and then contact WD tech support to see if they have a solution or at least an explanation why your drive fails in AHCI mode, but works fine when AHCI mode is disabled. I don't know if the legacy versus native setting is causing your problem. I think that the legacy setting is required for earlier operating systems such as win95/98 or 3.x.

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

I saw a 120GB SAMSUNG 840 Series SSD, it is kind of cheap I guess. It's strange though from what I had mentioned earlier about me switching the yellow sata port motherboard out with this one. It accepted everything right away, but doing a new installation, made the hdd be forgotten. I've done 3 new installations, so far and it's still the same result.

I removed the bootmgr to see if I could maybe fool the operating system into letting me get past the number 23 during device loading in AHCI mode. That worked, but when I went to do a boot repair, the c: drive wasn't even detected, instead windows thought that the d: drive was the c: drive.

So I guess it is incompatible with the rev 1.3 of the model.

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

This is a long shot, but your F10d beta bios might be part of the problem.
Flashing to the F9 or F8 bios version might fix the AHCI mode problem and will support your cpu.
The cpu support list shows that bios version F1 is the minimum required version for all supported processors.
After any bios flash, you will need to immediately enter the bios, load optimized bios defaults, save settings and exit, and then re-enter the bios to enable AHCI mode and set any other bios settings.

You can save your current bios settings with F10d using Qflash.
To flash your system back to F10d, the saved bios needs to be in a FAT12/16/32 usb, floppy or hard drive partition.
See http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte...ash-guide.html for more information.

Note:
gigabyte.com lists all four versions of your motherboard
gigabyte.us only lists the 1.0 and 1.4 versions of your motherboard

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

I tried F7 and F9 with no change, unfortunately. I contacted Western Digital too. I will probably just have to wait until I get the Samsung SSD. Thanks

[profJim]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

You're welcome, let us know how it finally works out.

[Konally]

Re: GA EP43T-UD3L SATA/AHCI doesn't work anymore, only IDE

Alright, I will Thanks