AHCI issues with GA-MA785G-UD3H F5G?

[superlgn]

Hi,

I have a GA-MA785G-UD3H motherboard running the F4 BIOS without any problems. I've been thinking about upgrading to a Phenom II X6 1045T processor but I'd need to flash the F5G beta BIOS according to the CPU compatibility chart. I thought I better do that before buying anything but once flashed the system was freezing during the AMD AHCI option rom drive scan. I let it sit there for upwards of 30 minutes and still nothing. No error messages, nothing strange on the screen, just "scanning drives". I played around with some related bios settings but that didn't help. Disconnecting everything connected to the onboard SATA didn't make a difference either. The only way I could get my system to booth with AHCI enabled was to disconnect all of the drives on my 3ware 9650se controller. With those off I could reconnect everything else and it was fine. I believe if I switched from AHCI to IDE the system would boot, but I have an eSATA enclosure I frequently use and some internal hotswap enclosures for everything else connected to the onboard controller, so I really need AHCI.

The F5G changelog on the download page says only the CPU code was updated but this AHCI option rom is also new. F4 and earlier use something very different from 2007. F5G includes AMD AHCI option rom v3.0.1540.59, which I think was released sometime in 2009. Have you guys heard of any problems with addon controller cards using this AHCI option rom? I don't know why it would care about things it's not handling but the 3ware controller definitely appears to be causing problems for it.

I did a bit of reading on modifying a bios with cbrom and tried to replace the ahci.BIN in F5G with something newer, but both qflash and the command line utility complained about the bios image and wouldn't write it out. I thought about extracting the old file from F4 but I assumed that wouldn't work either. I didn't want to force anything and ruin my motherboard so I'm back to F4 for now.

I'm guessing Gigabyte may not release any additional bios updates for this board so I'm pretty much stuck with F4 and my current processor. That's not a big problem since I'm fairly happy with the system the way it is, but I could always use some extra cores...

Anyone have ideas?

Thanks

[Vezina]

Looks like some incompatibility.

The option would be to get some other motherboard that has BIOS support active.
Or simply remove the hardware that is incompatible.

Don t play with the AHCI flashes ,unless you have a spare motherboard around.

[superlgn]

Yes I was afraid of that. I was hoping to minimize expenses by just buying a new CPU that might be able to keep me going for another 3 years or so since this 550 was holding up so well. AMD's new offerings don't sound all that great so i didn't feel a need to buy a new motherboard/cpu/memory. That's why I was willing to go to the extreme of modding the bios.