# New Seagate SATA drive problems -P4P800-E Deluxe



## weckels (Nov 20, 2004)

I just added a single Seagate SATA 200gb drive to the SATA1 port (Intel) on my computer running WinXP Pro with P4 3.0 ghz processor, P4P800-E Deluxe mb, and dual WD Raptor drives set up with Raid0 on the Promise ports. The new drive is acting very flaky. If I don't use the drive the system works fine. If I try to copy something on the drive, sometimes the system locks up completely. I didn't have any problems with the computer before adding this drive. I have been able to copy a few smaller files to it. It mainly locks up the system if I try to copy a large file (over 1gb) to it or if I try to play a windows media video from it. I downloaded the newest Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility and tried that but it did not help. I also updated the bios to the newest version but that didn't help either. I was a bit leary from the start after installing the drive because the drivers for the hardware that was was found all said they weren't signed by Microsoft. Even the drivers in the new chipset installation utility were not signed. This is probably common and maybe is not a big deal. I ran the DiscWizard from Seagate and the drive checks out fine. The system will usually lock up when I try to format it either from Windows or from the DiscWizard. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated!!! I am new to this forum and already I am impressed with the quality posts and answers seen here!!!

Thanks,
Will


----------



## cdrov (Nov 3, 2004)

Same thing with the 200GB Drive. I have RMA'd 3 Seagate Drives but they appeared to have the same issues. I then gave it back and took a 200GB Western Digital SATA drive and everything works fine. I believe that it is somekind of incompatibility between Seagate 200GB drive and 875 chipset.


----------



## Oceanborn (Nov 1, 2004)

*Seagate Drives*

Hello Guys, I don't know if that's the cause of your problems but the seagates are the only drives that support NCQ(Native Command Queueing) in other words, they are true SATA drives as the others use bridges to convert PATA signals to SATA signals. It seems the ICH5 has problems with Native sata drives which is weird...
You could try to plug the Seagate on the Promise controller to see what happens....


----------



## cdrov (Nov 3, 2004)

Yes it seems a good explanation. Despite that i have tried every possible connection to the system with no results. I also tried the drive to an ALBATRON 865Pe Pro but the results were almost the same. The drive worked some times and some other not. Ofcourse the benchmarks were giving high results for the specific drive but in practice the system became crazy. I rememeber that when i was using the drive my computer needed enough time to open. I had it connected to the raid 1 (promise) but nothing!


----------



## jbloggs (Oct 27, 2004)

Hi,

I have an Asus P4P800 E Deluxe mobo, I had a Seagate 200Gb Barracuda 7200.7 SATA installed on SATA1 and used it as the boot drive without any problems. 

I then bought another Seagate 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA and installed them on the Intel ICH5R Controller as a RAID0 array using Clintfan's guide. The setup runs without any problems. 

I have a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB on the Promise Controller which also runs without any problems.


----------



## weckels (Nov 20, 2004)

Thanks for all the posts. I have been away for a while and am now just getting back to check on the thread. I RMA'd my Seagate and got a WD 200GB Sata. I had the same problem. Just to see what would happen I connected the WD to SATA2 (Intel) and everything works great. Must be something wrong with SATA1. Thanks again for all the input.


----------



## captainbanes (Nov 25, 2004)

Hi all,

i have a Asus P4P800-E Deluxe and a Maxtor DiamondMax10 (6B160MO, 160GB, SATA and NCQ!!). Using the disk as bootdisk is not possible on Intel SATA1 and SATA2. The PC always freezes after a short time. If i install Win XP on a IDE HD, i can use the SATA HD as data storage and the PC works stable the whole evenig.
I think the ICH5R SATA controller cannot work fine with a NCQ HD with native command queuing. 

Now i dont know what to do. Return the board or the HD? Maybe the guys from Asus bring a new Bios (i have 1005e.002 bios) and the bug is fixed. I have contacted already Asus and Maxtor.

Does anybody know a HD with NCQ that works with the Asus P4P800-E Deluxe?

I learn from that: Never buy the newest stuff, always use proven hardware...

@ weckels: Is it realy running stable on SATA2? I tried and on my board its the same on SATA2.

@ cdrov: What do you do now with that issue?

@ Oceanborn: I agree with you, but shouldn't the HD be also compatible to all SATA? The drive gets sold as SATA drive, so it has to work on a SATA port...


Regards, AleX.


http://de.geocities.com/alexeckes


----------



## Oceanborn (Nov 1, 2004)

*Ncq*

I agree with you, the drives should be compatible...like I mentioned, I don't actually have any SATA drives in my system, so my response was entirely theoretical in nature, but I based my response on an article that I read on www.anandtech.com that said that only the Intel ICH6 which is southbridge that comes with the new Intel 9xx Series supports NCQ. Therefore I'm inclined to assume that ICH5 doesn't support NCQ. I intend to get a new SATA drive in the future but considering the problems I heard with the Seagates I think I'm gonna stay away from the NCQ drives since my board doesn't support it.
You can try ti plug your HD on the Promise Controller altough I don't know if it supports NCQ or not


----------



## captainbanes (Nov 25, 2004)

Today i bought a IBM/Hitachi 160GB harddisk without NCQ (102 Euro). And ... it works fine ! No problems at all, fast and low noise.
Now i will see what to do with the Maxtor Diamondmax10. As it is not realy out of order i can't return it to the dealer. Maybe i explain the problem once again to Maxtor and Asus.

Now, after a week of useless trying, i can start to install my new PC.

I hope there will be some Bios update, so that NCQ HDDs will work with my board. Otherwise it will be difficult to get a new HDD in some years. I just bought the Asus P4P800E new and want to use it some years. 

Have fun, AleX.


----------



## weckels (Nov 20, 2004)

CaptainBanes,
Yes, the WD drive plugged into SATA2 is working fine. I haven't had any problems at all.

Will


----------



## JuanK (Nov 25, 2004)

Hi All!

Well...that about NCQ makes sense!!!

I bought a P4P800-E Deluxe a couple of days ago...and at the same time I bought a Maxtor DiamoMax 10, S-ATA 300Gb which has NCQ and I've had a hell trying to get it work on the Intel Controller.

Sometimes the system hags when installing WXP (SP2), and if it could make it the whole way, then I started to get errors on the event viewer like:
----
Type: Error
Source: Disk
EventID: 11

The driver detected a controller error on
\Device\Harddisk0\D
----
Type: error
Source: atapi
EventID: 5

A parity error was detected on
\Device\Ide\idePort2
----
and at the end...the whole HD got corrupt.
I did try a lot of differents configurations...and the only ones working, were when I pluged the HD on the Promise controller. Then everything worked fine and I didn't got any errors at all.

The Promise s-ata controller supports NCQ and I guess that's why the HD works fine. I'll not return my mobo or my hd, thus I hope ASUS releases some kind of bios update fixing the problem with NCQ on the Intel Controller.

Regards
//JC


----------



## Omar Brännstrom (Dec 17, 2004)

Hi

Its working now!

Sorry for my bad english!

I also have the ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA 250GB 16MB cache. 

Wanted my Maxtor SATA to be systemdisk (bootdisk)

After one week i finally got it to work. My Firmware in the harddrive BIOS was faulty The BANC1980 (is bad), I replaced it with a new one that a got from my local Computershop, and they sad that they got it From Maxtor and it can not be found for downloading from their website, crazy.

After that I still didnt get it to work on the SATA 1 connection (Intel ICH5R), that is beacause i installed the "Sata 378 promise driver" at F6 when I installed Windows XP.

It worked well on the the Promise controller SATA 1 RAID 1.


So if you have this motherboard with Intel ICH5R do not install any drivers with F6 if you only want SATA to work on the Intel ICH5R SATA 1 and SATA 2 connectors on the motherbord.

So windows XP started upp without problem but the next problem for me was when I was running Windows update it got dead.

SATA needs SP1 from windows, install this first.

Formatted with Maxblast 3 installed windows again (without driver at F6). And then in windows i directly installed SP1 from CD and then runned Windows update and loaded all down and also SP2.

Now everything works well and no strange things in the event viewer.

I have One Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA 250GB 16MB cache on the SATA1 (bootdisk) and another Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA 250GB on the SATA2.
I also have one Maxtor IDE 120GB hardrive connected to IDE (as slave), and two CD room drives.

For now it works well, but you newer now with computers.

Best regards

Omar Brännström
Sweden


----------



## pintofhooky (Oct 28, 2004)

*seagate sata's on ich5r*

if you go to the intel site, there is an update for the ich5r and ich6r raid accelerator, the original sofware did not support ncq, the new iaar does, on the ich5r the iaar works but you cannot use all of the features that the ich6r can


----------



## Omar Brännstrom (Dec 17, 2004)

Hi

Should I really install ich5 raid accelerator if I only want yo run the SATA disk as normal (no raid) storage disks (one system disk, boot disk) connected to SATA1 and SATA2 connectors on the motherboard?

If so is it this? http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scr...SFullName=Windows*+XP+Professional&submit=Go!

Best regards

Omar Brännström


----------



## pintofhooky (Oct 28, 2004)

well, i think you would want to, not for the raid but for the ncq support, as the seagate hard drives use ncq and most others don't yet. I would read what intel has to say about the ncq support, but the current drivers for ich5r didn't support ncq.


your mileage may vary, i'm not an expert, perhaps clintfan or blackduck could enlighten further :4-dontkno


----------



## cdrov (Nov 3, 2004)

Hi, It is really a big pain. I was trying to fix the drive for over 1 and a half month but with no results. Finally i rma'd the seagate drives and got WD drives (i have 6 of them and i am very happy at the moment). At the beginning i thought that it is ICH5 responsible for the problems in comarison with the NCQ but i now think that it should be ASUS, ICH5 and NCQ. I am saying that because i have tried the Seagate to an Albatron mb with ICH5 and worked fine. :normal:


----------



## Omar Brännstrom (Dec 17, 2004)

Hi

Hmm!! I stil got the message "The driver detected a controller error on
\Device\Harddisk1\D" in the event viewer. EventID: 11

Windows works, but I still dont like the EventID:11.

Any suggestions?


----------



## wydmex (Jan 5, 2005)

Hi all,
It took a lot of badgering of Maxtor and Asus, swearing at my monitor and increased blood pressure when fed the initial BS but Maxtor have admitted to me that there is an "incompatibility problem" between the ICH5 controller and their new native SATA DiamondMax 10 series. (Maybe this was just to shut me up?) :tongue: 

I have the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe mobo and the drive (6B300S0) works fine on the Promise controller. Like many others though I too want it functioning on the native Intel ICH5R.

Indeed NCQ isn't supported by the ICH5(R) but this doesn't mean the drive will not work. See http://www.sata-io.org/featureofmonth.asp. 
Notice the statement: "Devices that support NCQ are 100% backward compatible with non-NCQ supporting systems" 

So essentially we just don't get the benefit of NCQ technology but the drive "should" work!!! 
Check the Non-NCQ test bed too at the bottom of this article... the D865GBF chipsetted Intel board... This contains a ICH5 controller!!!

The Promise controller however does support the drive and has the added benefit of supporting NCQ too. However (and it's a big however) the performance of the drive is really shot in the foot when connected to this controller as the controller itself is attached to the PCI bus, limiting the throughput of the drive badly. 

Unfortunately Maxtor cannot give me any kind of lead time as to when the problem will be fixed. They did say it was being worked! :exclaim:
I did suggest and hope they would post some sort of statement on their support website but alas to date, nothing. :4-thatsba

It just baffles me that a company like Maxtor failed (I can only presume this is what happened) to test their DiamondMax 10 drives against an ICH5(R) controller before release. Doh! :4-hit:
Can this really be the case?


----------



## Oceanborn (Nov 1, 2004)

That statement that tbecause the promise controller resides on the PCI bus and it's slower is true for the case where you're setting up a RAID array. If you plan on using the drive as normal drives the Promise controller is said to be head to head with the ICHR5
You can give that a shot and benchmark the difference....you can see for yourself...


----------



## wydmex (Jan 5, 2005)

Oceanborn, I did, I ran it and my DiamondMax 9 series drive (on the ICH5) through HDTach 3.0.
The sequential read was erratic in comparison to the 9 series to say the least, with numerous dropouts.

The burst read too was poor reaching only 93.4Mb/s compared to 116Mb/s from the 9 series drive. Reviews suggest I should get much higher value for this drive, even without NCQ.

The average read managed 53.7Mb/s which isn't bad.

However I can tell you, through normal day to day usage it feels a lot slower large file copy jobs are a lot slower, things just seem a lot more sluggish.


----------



## wydmex (Jan 5, 2005)

All, it would appear that Asus have solved the problem for us P4C800-E Deluxe owners. ray: 
Their German ftp site has the following BIOS 1021ed03.zip which appears to solve the native SATA compatibility problem with the Maxtor 6B300S0 at least. It's not advertised but I've tried it and my drive now works! Ok it's beta but it's a step closer.
Heaven only knows then where Maxtor were coming from when they claimed to me that it was their drive that was incompatible with the ICH5.  
For those P4P800 owners take a look here there may be an update that fixes the issues you're experiencing too. Good luck.
HDD performance much better now, burst performance is up to a much more respectable 135.7Mb/s, with the drive now averaging 54Mb/s :grin:


----------



## PRELUDiCON (Jan 18, 2005)

wydmex...

I flashed my BIOS with the BETA version of 1021 for my ASUS P4P800 Deluxe board...

And my MAXTOR 6B300S0 is now recognized INSTANTLY !!! :grin: 

Got the drive about a month ago and everytime I powered down the PC and then powered back up, drive not detected.

Now it works great...just tried it once though, but all the signs are looking good!

THANK YOU !!!!


----------



## cat's eye (Jan 19, 2005)

*Whole system performance fell down*

Interesting thread ...

I've just get a Seagate 7200.8 250Go drive and I have a different issue. When I plug it, all my drive's (even the SCSI ones) performances are very low, (like 1M/s or less instead of 60 M/s), so I will try the beta BIOS and see if it solves this problem, if not I will try to get refund for the drive ... :sigh:


----------



## cat's eye (Jan 19, 2005)

Finally the drive works well now with the 1019 BIOS .... :smile: 
I don't know if I will try the 1021 beta ... hum I'd like to ... :1angel:


----------



## cat's eye (Jan 19, 2005)

Th 1021 beta 2 BIOS works fine for me too, so now the Seagate achieves a transfer rate close to my 15k SCSI drive (on Nero speed test), nice ! :heartlove


----------



## IAmATeaf (Jan 21, 2005)

wydmex said:


> For those P4P800 owners take a look here there may be an update that fixes the issues you're experiencing too.


Any ideas which of those BIOSes would be used with a P4P800E-Deluxe it's not made that clear.

I used to have an IC7-G with 2 Seagate SATA drives with NCQ and they ran no problems whatsoever but I've since had to return the board and thought I'd give the P4P800E-Deluxe a try but the contents of this post worries me a bit.


----------



## RunnerD (Jan 21, 2005)

*p4p800-E*

I have had same problems with this asus motherboard for 3 months. I was first running asus p4p800 se, Pentium 4 2.8E ghz, diamondMax SATA 200gig, ati radeon All_In-Wonder 9800pro. Everytime I would run the TV Tuner (all in wonder) and Internet Explorer at same time, the system would hang after a few minutes, go to black screen.

I had all latest ATI Catalyst drivers, latest Intel Chipset Drivers, XP sp2, and latest asus bios. System would always crash when I would use the tv feature, or sometimes without even doing the tv. Just random black screen every few hours. Sometimes just sitting there doing nothing - black screen.

I replaced Everything piece by piece.

New system - Asus P4P800-e deluxe, Pentium 4 (upgraded to Pentium 4 3.0Ghz), same video card (RMA and I got a new one), new memory, and two new Diamond Max 200gb SATA now running on the promise controller RAID 0 (should of got a differnt brand instead of another DiamondMax to see if that was problem), new case. I did clean install, all updated drivers and the thing still crashes all the time to black screen.

The only thing I can think of is its the hard drives (they seem to act weird, sometimes get errors on bootup). I think im going to go to standard ide drive and see if that fixes the crashes. Im sure that the ATi Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder would be compatible with this motherboard and not give me these problems.

You spend $1500 on a computer, and nothing even works the way its suppose to. It really gets to your nerves after spending hours and hours on this thing.


----------



## IAmATeaf (Jan 21, 2005)

Well my new P4P800E Deluxe has finally arrived and I will be installing it over the next few days, as I stated earlier I have 2 Seagate SATA 160gb NCQ drives to go on this motherboard so I'll keep you updated as to how I get on with this mobo. 

In the meatime does anybody have any ideas which of the beta BIOSes given in the FTP link could be used for this mobo just in case I have problems?


----------



## wydmex (Jan 5, 2005)

All,
Asus's BIOS updates have always been pretty solid, never once using their products and flashing their BIOSs have I ever needed to roll back or had a problem.
In fact this is the only time I have needed to flash the BIOS to actually fix something!

I'd suggest going with the latest BIOS (BETA or not) and flashing that mobo!  Obviously I take no responsibility if you f it up! -razz: 

As a matter of principle I always flash my BIOS if there is a new update. Granted this may be against what many manuals say...but what the heck!
Ok maybe I've just been lucky for the last 10 years, I don't know? I'm sure others have been less fortunate...Hey maybe we need a "Bad flashing experience thread"? :grin:


----------



## IAmATeaf (Jan 21, 2005)

Well I installed the mobo yesterday with the following:

3.2GHz Northwood cooled by a Thermalright 947U and 92mm Delta fan
2 * 512mb Twinmos Winbond DDR400 RAM
Enermax 350w PSU
2 * Seagate SATA 160Gb drives with NCQ
SB Live!
Toshiba DVD-ROM
NEC 2510 DVD-R/RW
NEC USB2 card with 3." front port unit

Before I installed the board I put a small passive heatsink on the Southbridge and resoldered the mount points for the Northbridge just in case they pop out in use like that reported with the Abit mobo.

I'm happy to report that I didn't have a single problem, the system picked up the SATAs straight away, created a partition, formatted and installed like a dream. The BIOS version was as supplied 1004 and the board has rev 1.02 imprinted on it. Both drives are buzzing away quite nicely and the best thing is that the performance of this board is on par with the Abit IC7-G which it replaced. Temps sit at around 37 on idle rising to around 44 under load so all in all I'm happy.

This doesn't answer the original question but it does prove that the ICH5R chipset doesn't mind a drive that natively supports NCQ even if the feature can't be used by the ICH5R chipset and TBH after reading the posts in this thread I was dreading putting the system together but it's been working like a dream.

One question I do have is as I've wired the 92mm delta via a 4 pin molex and the fan doesn't have speed reporting I get an error beep on boot with CPU Fan Error! message, is there anyway to disable this ie tell the BIOS not to bother monitoring it?


----------



## XP-Master (Feb 4, 2005)

*P4P800-E Deluxe (ICHR-5) & NCQ Hard disks issues*

Hi,
As many of you, i was unable to use my new HD (Maxtor Maxline III 250 Go SATA *NCQ*) as boot disk on the *P4P800-E Dlx*, even after an RMA of the Mobo + HD and with the Beta Bios 1006Rev003 found ont the German FTP Website.
It took me a month to find the reason why ... thanks to the help of both Intel & Maxtor support team.
In fact Intel explained me by e-mail that the ICH(R)5 chipset wasn't able to handle the Native Command Queuing.
Than i exchanged the Maxtor with 2 Seagate Barracuda 160 Go SATA (Non NCQ versions !!!) and it works fine !
In conclusion you should take care to only use non NCQ HD versions (Seagate Barracuda or Maxtor 9 + : see website before buying it) on the intel SATA controller, otherwhise you have to plug you NCQ HD on the Promise SATA controller, in IDE mode.
That's probably the reason why some of you (like "bloggs")where able to use their SATA HD (Non NCQ versions) and some not ...
Good luck :wave:


----------



## IAmATeaf (Jan 21, 2005)

XP-Master said:


> Hi,
> As many of you, i was unable to use my new HD (Maxtor Maxline III 250 Go SATA *NCQ*) as boot disk on the *P4P800-E Dlx*, even after an RMA of the Mobo + HD and with the Beta Bios 1006Rev003 found ont the German FTP Website.
> It took me a month to find the reason why ... thanks to the help of both Intel & Maxtor support team.
> In fact Intel explained me by e-mail that the ICH(R)5 chipset wasn't able to handle the Native Command Queuing.
> ...


Jeez, this gets wierder and wierder, as I mentioned my mobo is a rev 1.02 and I have 2 Seagate 160gb NCQ drives plugged into the Intel ICH5R controller and both are working fine. I did get my mobo just in the last 2 weeks so maybe there's a hardware diff in the newer mobos compared to the older. I've only got a single problem and that is that the the Seagate system disk randomly "chirps" ie makes a chirping type sound every now and again. Checked both disks out as I initially thought it was the case speaker, searched around and it seems that if the disk makes this type of sound then it may be on the way out so I'll wait for it to die before RMAing it back to Seagate.


----------



## Felty (Feb 4, 2005)

*Cables*

Be sure to try a different cable, and remember to watch how you route them as the are not a shielded cable and will react to RF interference. 
Felty


----------



## mike1664 (Feb 5, 2005)

*Bios 1021ed03*

Hi Brand new to the site it looks good guys

i had a look earlier and with thread 21 in mind 
"Their German ftp site has the following BIOS 1021ed03.zip which appears to solve the native SATA compatibility problem with the Maxtor 6B300S0 at least. It's not advertised but I've tried it and my drive now works! Ok it's beta but it's a step closer."

i downloaded the Bios 1021ed03
and installed. It caused me no end of trouble my system would not Boot saying cpu overclocking problem. I had to flash back to the previous bios


----------

