# Asus P4P800-X SATA Boot problems



## Molko (Oct 2, 2004)

Hi

I do hope someone can help.

Ok i am building a PC for a mate, the spec is ASUS p4p800-x, PIII3.0ghz, 1gb ram, Radion 9800Se and Maxtor 80GB Diamond 9. The h/d is SATA (NON RAIDED) !. I built the machine, installed WinXP, now when installin WinXP it asked if i wished to installed some drivers, by pressing F6. rightly or wrongly i ignored it and let WinXP complete the installation process.

Shortly after installing WinXP, it became apparent that the VGA was faulity, so i replaced it this morning and hoped to continue with the installation.

NOW, here is the problem, for some reason when i boot the machine up is hanging during the boot process 'Auto Detecting 3rd master',it will stay like this for 15mins. If i leave the SATA h/d connected, the machine will NOT boot from floppy. SO i have no way of fdisking it and starting again.....or do i ? I can also not get into the BIOS, unless i reset the jumpers on the CMOS and at the next time of booting i can access the BIOS, the h/d is recgonised as Maxtor 80gb etc... but then when i exit the BIOS, its still the same problem....'Auto Detecting 3rd master'.

What have i done/doing wrong...?
How do i resolve this problem... ?


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## Molko (Oct 2, 2004)

Its actually a ASUS p4p800S-X and a PIIII 3.0Ghz...sorry for the confusion


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## Molko (Oct 2, 2004)

Things have got really odd now.

I disabled the sata drive, booted from CD, winXp said there was no fixed drive, as expected. So i resest the CMOS, and rebooted, booted from CD, installed WinXP, drive detected, pressed f6 and installed the specific SATA driver, the WinXP installion detected my sata drive, formatted NTFS, copied all the installation files across and then rebooted - i thought great its worked..............BUT NO....upon rebootig were are back to the 'Auto Detecting 3rd master'...problem !!!.

WHAT IS GOING ON ?, i cant understand it the, the pyhsical drive must be ok, the sata cable must be ok, the sata power must be ok, i have the lastest BIOS, so what is wrong.....? ?


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## Molko (Oct 2, 2004)

The latest is

The machine will boot into WindowsXP provided i reset the CMOS beforehand........very strange, so i have installed WINXP, then SP1, after SP1 the machine reboots, it then hangs with the 'Auto Detecting 3rd master' problem, so i clear the CMOS, it then says that the CMOS has been reset and do i wish to change the BIOS setting or load the default. Upoad loading the default BIOS, the machine boots into WINXP.....so what do you make of that ????

After the CMOS reset i can see :
-----------------
Auto Dectecting Primary Master....ATAPI CDROM
Auto Dectecting 3rd Master....IDE HARD DISK

Pri Master NEC DVD RW Ultra DMA Mode 2
3rd Master MAxtor 6Y080M0 YAR51HW0 Ultra DMA Mode 5 S.M.A.R.T Capable and Status OK
-----------------

The only things that concerns me about the above is it thinks 3rd Master is IDE ?...

I am now gonna try and find some specific drivers for the hard drive, not came with it (OEM) and none are supplies on tthe motherboard disk, the ones that have installed are Microsoft from 01/07/2001

any help/advice is greatly appreciated.

thanks
m


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## exp_cj (Sep 30, 2004)

Doesn't sound completely differen from my problems 
http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?t=17760


Are you setting the bios up to auto detect the 3rd master? (if not what are the other options?)

Are the jumpers on the drive set to master?

did you know that you can press F8 after the bios runs (if it doesn't hang infinitely on the 3rd master detect) and select a boot device from a list?

Try flashing in the bios version before the latest one and see if it makes any difference. If it does report it to Asus. 

I don't know exactly how your MoBo is set out, but on mine you can attach an SATA drive to the SATA raid port and if you don't install a raid driver, it just runs it as a normal disk. 


good luck mate.


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## clintfan (Sep 4, 2003)

Hey there's a new v1007 BIOS posted on the P4P800S-X download site as of a couple weeks ago, something about a hang during reboot.

-clintfan


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## ChuckB0612 (Nov 12, 2004)

Thanks Clintfan....I saw that BIOS update you mentioned (1007), I flashed the BIOS because I was having the same problem where the machine hangs while detecting 3rd master. The update made no difference even after reinstalling Windows XP Pro.

Sometimes on a cold boot now I have to hit the reset button 2 or 3 times before it boots and doesn't hang. Other times it will boot right up. Very odd...

Wondering if I should contact ASUS direct or go back to the local vendor that built my machine. I am almost convinced at this point what tiguy4755 said in this post makes a lot of sense...

http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?t=23778

That it's basically probably the SATA onboard controller causing problems (corrupting data), and not the drive itself because at one point when I booted I got an error that there was data corruption on the drive and chkdsk needed to run, it ran and the fix the problem and I have not gotten it since, and the WD diagnostic utility tells me the drive tests fine..?? 

Anyone else have any ideas or input? I really don't want to stay with this mobo if I am going to have issues with data corruption on the SATA bus...

CB


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