PCI Sata Controller
 

Need some assistance if possible.

I have just installed a PCI Sata Controller after my friend bought me a SATA drive as a gift. As I dont have onboard SATA and currently have all my IDE connections in use I decided to checkout a PCI controller.

I bought a fairly cheap card (£30) with a silicon image 3512 chip.

Got it all in my machine fine, it posts and recognises the SATA hard disk when booting up however, I was formatting my new disk and the system crashed - Total screen freeze and nothing going on with the disks. I left it for 20 minutes and came back to find the same.

I rebooted - Installed the latest drivers for windows and updated the bios on the PCI card.

Still the same problem, i decided to go into safe mode and have a crack at formating it in safe mode - worked no problem.

Wondered whether the problem had mysteriously gone away and tried to copy some data to the new disk on windows and it crashed again.

I am not too sure whats going on I dont think there are any conflicts going on but it is a little strange how windows allowed it to go in safe mode.

Cheers

Jim

When thing like this happens, it makes me feel stupid. In my case, the damn brand new SATA drive was BAD.:) I had similar occurances based on your actions taken.

Indeed, run the diagnostics tools for the brand of drive you are using.
That's seatools for seagate, WDdiag for WD, powermax for maxtor, and hitachi/IBM have something similar.
These will make a bootdisk with the program, so you'll need a diskdrive and a floppy disk.

If you didn't find any errors on the drive, you might be experiencing some IRQ conflict that windows can't handle. Try another PCI slot to see if that helps.

And off course there might be something with the card, but that's hard to test without replacement parts.

Cheers for the response people.

I have partially worked out the problem, my SATA card and Soundcard are sharng the same IRQ.

Having removed my Soundcard - no more crash's.

Now my problem is changing the IRQ's - on both cards the option is greyed out in windows - any idea's?

Edit: Like you said freestyler - have tried the card in other slots but no joy

try several PCI combinations, for both sound and SATA (and maybe other items).
Also you could mark the clear (or force update or whatever) ESCD option in bios. This should empty the PNP IRQ table created for the PCI devices.
And while you are there, try messing with the "PNP OS installed"(or similar) option. If it's on, turn it off, and the other wat around.

Maybe not the most professional way to handle it, but it might just work ;)

Wicked, bit late now and am enjoying the speed of my data transfers but I will give it a go tomorrow

Nice one :ws:

Still no joy, changed all the PCI slots round and forced the Soundcard onto a different IRQ yet it still crash's :(

Anyone else got any idea's?

which soundcard is it? Audigy's are bitches sometimes. :)

Its a soundblaste Live