GA-MA785GM-US2H ide bug?

[ripit]

I'm having all different kinds of problems with anything ide I try with this board.  It happens with the onboard controller as well as a pci-e controller.  Anything sata works fine but anything pata has all kinds of issues.

A few examples. 
A sony dvd burner as slave and a seagate 300GB hard drive as master on the onboard controller.  Sometimes neither shows up in the  bios, sometimes both show up fine, but windows 7 sometimes takes 10 minutes to boot and the hard drive is throwing hundreds of errors.  a few times, during boot, the hard drive detected fine, but the dvd drive shows a long string of random characters rather than the name and model of the drive. 

the sony dvd drive and a 500 gig seagate hard drive on an add in pci-e controller.  I had to reboot windows 4 times before it would properly recognize and install drivers for the dvd drive (device manager showed no drivers installed and it would not let me install them). 

Two 160 gig hard drives (a segate and a hitachi) on the onboard controller.  The slave drive doesn't show up and the master drive is showing lots of smart errors (and windows keeps popping up that the drive is failing). 

It often hangs for a long time during boot (not just when windows is trying to boot, but when it is going through detecting hardware etc.). 

Fyi I have spent endless hours searching for info on the problem and have tried endless combinations of hardware (4 different hard drives, 3 dvd drives and 3 different ide cables, 2 were brand new).  I have tried all kinds of different combinations.  Fyi, I always set drives as slave and master, not cable select.   

I did find out that windows 7 hanging during boot for 10 minutes is often caused by a controller or drive problem.  I found endless threads of people having problems with ide on gigabyte boards but not a lot of solutions. 

Fyi, I have also tested some of the hardware in other computers and it is fine. 

its a revision 1.0 board with bios f8 (I have not flashed it, it shipped with that). 

I have spent so many hours trying to trouble shoot the board I'm about to trash it and get something else.  I really don't have time to have the system down during an rma so if its defective, I'll have to get another board anyway. 

Does anyone have a clue what could be causing all these problems?  Is there some sort of known bug (at this point that is what I am thinking as so many seem to have problems) and if so is there a fix?  I didn't see anything mentioned in the newer bios's about fixing any ide or controller issues?

cpu is a sempron dual core 2300, 4 1 gig sticks of corsair ddr2 800 memory.  Pcie controler is a jmb 363 based controller with 1 pata and 2 sata.

As mentioned, anything sata works fine onboard or on the controller card (including a sata optical drive).  Nothing pata works right onboard or on the controller card in any combination. 

[absic]

Hi there and sorry to read about your IDE problems.

I'm not aware of any problems but, to be honest, I haven't been looking.

The best advice I can offer in the short term is to try updating BIOS as I notice that, for your Mobo revision, it is now at F12A. Gigabyte, are pretty vague about what the BIOS updates actually address and, although it doesn't say it will fix an IDE problem, you might find that one of the more recent versions does exactly that.

The other thing of course, is to check that you have the latest Chipset drivers for your Mobo as the ones on the install disk can often be out of date.

[Dark Mantis]

Firstly I would like to make it clear that I do not know much about this particular board or the AMD platform in general. But from what I have picked up here and on other forums I post on there does indeed seem to be a problem with using both PATA and SATA on the same board. I really don't know why but it is not limited to Gigabyte boards. It almost seems an accepted practice now to not mix and match unless you want problems.

[ripit]

Honestly, I never got as far as the install disk for drivers.  Windows 7 installed drivers for almost everything during setup.  During update, it seemed to be using oem drivers instead of generic ones (for instance, windows update ran a creative driver install for my sound blaster).  I have checked drivers and everything looks fine in device manager.  

Seeing as it is having major problems from the second it boots (long before it gets to windows), I was suspecting that it was not a driver issue.  I wanted to try and resolve that issue before dealing with alternative drivers to avoid complicating things even more.  I guess I'll have to try a bios update.  The way things have been going with it, I'll probably wind up killing the board, but I guess that is the next logical step.  If I can get it where it reliably and correctly detects the drives during boot, then I would think updated drivers would be something to look into.  

has anyone else heard of problems like this (or better yet, a solution)?

Hi there and sorry to read about your IDE problems.

I'm not aware of any problems but, to be honest, I haven't been looking.

The best advice I can offer in the short term is to try updating BIOS as I notice that, for your Mobo revision, it is now at F12A. Gigabyte, are pretty vague about what the BIOS updates actually address and, although it doesn't say it will fix an IDE problem, you might find that one of the more recent versions does exactly that.

The other thing of course, is to check that you have the latest Chipset drivers for your Mobo as the ones on the install disk can often be out of date.

[ripit]

I did notice that it seemed to be a problem with other models of gigabyte boards too.  I wonder if it is an issue with the chipsets and or some of the secondary controllers that are commonly being used.  I have older boards that have no issues whatsoever with running pata and sata together.  This is for an htpc that also is a media server for the rest of the network, so its got 5 sata hard drives, 3 pata hard drives, 1 pata dvd drive and 1 sata blueray drive.  I ran an abit ax8 (athlon 64 3400) and then a gigabyte lga 775 board (cannot remember the model off the top of my head but it was an older one)
witrh an e6300 (the older one) and nether had issues with a lot of mixed sata and pata drives.  Both these ran my htpc with that many drives.  I have also ran other older boards with less but still mixed drives with no issues.  Fyi, the pci-e controller card has 1 pata and 2 sata on the same card, and was used with the ax8 and the older lga775 gigabyte board without issues and both pata and sata atached to it.  Currently, there is nothing attached to the onboard pata and its still not working  (with pata and sata on the pci-e controller).  That controller was working fine with both sata and pata, just before I switched to this motherboard.  I wonder if a bad pata controller on the motherboard could cause conflicts with the pci-e pata controller.  I guess a bios update would be the next step, though that did not fix similar problems for others.  

Firstly I would like to make it clear that I do not know much about this particular board or the AMD platform in general. But from what bI have picked up here and on other forums I post on there does indeed seem to be ap[roblem with using both PATA and SATA on the same board. I really don't know why but it is not limited to Gigabyte boards. It almost seems an accepted practice now to not mix and match unless you want problems.

[ripit]

Just another observation.  If you look at reviews on newegg for gigabyte boards (I'm not sure if they have a presence there but they are one of the largest sellers here), you get all kinds of people saying, I'll never buy a gigabyte board again, I'm switching to asus.  Then if you look at the asus reviews. you get a bunch of people saying I'll never buy asus again, I'm switching to gigabyte (and similar statements for other brands.  Either quality control is terrible these days with any brand, or perhaps it is the chipsets.  They are pushing for new generations of processors and new chipsets so fast to remain competitive, I wonder if that is half the issue.  I really wish I could find a new board that was good as my old abit boards. 

Just a thought.

[Dark Mantis]

Just another observation.  If you look at reviews on newegg for gigabyte boards (I'm not sure if they have a presence there but they are one of the largest sellers here), you get all kinds of people saying, I'll never buy a gigabyte board again, I'm switching to asus.  Then if you look at the asus reviews. you get a bunch of people saying I'll never buy asus again, I'm switching to gigabyte (and similar statements for other brands.  Either quality control is terrible these days with any brand, or perhaps it is the chipsets.  They are pushing for new generations of processors and new chipsets so fast to remain competitive, I wonder if that is half the issue.  I really wish I could find a new board that was good as my old abit boards. 

Just a thought.

More than just a thought if you ask me. It is what several of us have been saying regarding a few of the problems that keep cropping up recently! There is the SATA3 issue, the noise issue, powers supply compatability problem, the AMD memory controller troubles and no end of others that affect not only Gigabyte motherboards but also many other brands. I think this is a case of pushing too fast.