Gents,
I'm rebuilding a Box for my Brother (his Asus P4G8X Deluxe died after 6 years and he wanted to rebuild rather than go new).
So I picked up a GA-EP35-DS3R - Rev. 2.1, an Intel E5300 (2.6 Ghz. 2 G Cache, 800 FSB) and 2X 2 Gigs of Corsair 4096-6400C5 XMS2 DDR2 Ram, OCZ 700W ModXStream Pro Power Supply, and an EVGA 8400 GS GPU. (It is all runnning stock speeds - no OCing.)
The Box has 2 permanent Hard Drives (HDs) and one Hot Swap Trayless SATA Bay. Initially I installed WinXP SP3 onto one HD connected to the 0 connector controlled by ICH9R. Then I unplugged it, and installed Win7 onto the second HD while connected to position 1. Both OSes worked fine independantly, but when I connected both drives to the MB, they wouldn't hot swap. So I dug deeper into the manual (around page 80) and found you must install and AHCI Driver before installing the OS to get Hot Swap capability.
I was shocked as even the 6 year old dinosaur Asus MB did that right out of the box! But as this is only the 3rd Ggabyte MB I've played with in depth, I chalked up the 10 hours or so making 2 complete images on the separate HDs (OS, Burning Suites, Defragging programs, DVD Movie Players, AntiVirus, etc., ) to experience, and started over. So this time I decided to an OS/HD to each controller to ensure that portion of the MB was working. (By the way, I used the Vista / Windows 64 drivers for the Win7 install on the ICH9 / GSATA controller. They work fine.)
So now both OSes "see" the other and are hot swappable. But now the issue is with the Hot Swap Trayless SATA Bay. Any drive I put in - regardless of controller connection, is not hot swappable in Win XP. Win 7 works fine. So now I'm stumped. Do any of you know why, and /or what I can do to make this work seamlessly?
Thanks for your help.
Regrds,
Jim
