I purchased the 770TA-UD3 not too long ago and have not been able to make it run stable. Furthermore I believe it is somehow either formatting or dropping partitions on my hard drives.
System:
Gigabyte 770TA-UD3
AMD Phenom II X4 955 (HDZ955FBGIBOX)
G.Skill 4GB DDR3 1600 (F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ)
Antec TruePower 750W (TP-750)
Rosewill RAID Adapter (RC-211)
Rosewill RAID Adapter (RC-209-EX)
SATA Devices:
2 - Seagate 250GB (ST3250318AS) for OS
2 - Seagate 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) for storage
1 - Hitachi 2TB (HDS722020ALA or HD32000) for storage
4 - Lite-On DVD-RW (iHAS424-98)
Problem:
Here's what happened. I installed all of these components (minus the Rosewill Adapter RC-209-EX) and tried to install Windows 7 64bit [Win7]. I put the 2 Seagate 250GB hard drives on the Rosewill Adapter RC-211. I was unable to use this setup. If I remember correctly, I either could not get into RAID bios on the card to setup the array for RAID-0, or Win7 would not accept the driver during Windows Setup. I swapped out the RC-211 and tried the RC-209-EX instead. Same problem. Let me also note at this point, when I had either of these adapters installed, I noticed that some motherboard bios options were missing. Entire menus options were gone. When I removed the adapter(s), they came back again.
I have 9 SATA devices and this board only has 8 ports, so I need an add-in adapter. At this point I just said "whatever, lets just get windows installed". I removed one of my Seagate 1.5TB drives. The 1.5TB drives and 2TB drive are storage drive for my video editing business. I enabled on-board RAID and enabled AHCI. I installed Win7 on the two 250GB drives.
I think the Win7 install went fine. I got my drivers installed and my Steam games installed including Left4Dead 2 [L4D2]. During about the next week I had lots of bizarre issues. Opening up an explorer window to browse a hard drive, for example, took a long time sometimes. It was almost like the system didn't know where the folder path was. Also I was getting Blue Screens [BSOD] while playing L4D2. So I ran SeaTools tests on my hard drives, which all passed, and MemTest on my memory, which also passed. Eventually I got a BSOD while booting up Win7. After that it could no longer boot.
So I began looking for what might be wrong. I eventually found that my bios was the original F1 and that there was an update to F2 available. Among the fixes was "mprove eSATA Device compatibility". So I updated the bios. I removed my 3 storage hard drives and 3 DVD-RW's. I re-installed Win7 a second time. I disabled Automatic Reboot after system failure. I installed drivers, windows updates, and L4D2. Eventually I started getting BSOD's again. The first one I got was DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. The second one was Interrupt Exception Not Handled. Finally I got the BSOD saying System Service Exception and my system would once again, not boot up.
So today I'm installing Win7 for the third time. Extra SATA devices were still unplugged. I tried my Rosewill adapter RC-211 and now Win7 can install to it and the bios menus are working fine. I disabled onboard RAID and changed from AHCI mode to IDE mode. Installation went fine. I proceeded to plug in all of my SATA devices. Two hard drives popped up and Win7 asked to re-format them. It also asked to reboot. So I rebooted and they still came up wanting to be re-formatted. So I plugged them into different ports, same thing. I plugged one of them into another computer, same thing. The two hard drives that are strangely missing their partitions are the same two drives (out of the 3 storage drives) that were plugged in when my system took a dive the first time.
To me, this begs the question, did something drop the partitions on ALL 4 drives that were plugged into my system during the first Win7 installation? That would explain why the two storage drives are empty and the system would not boot. And if so WHAT caused it? In ANY case I need my system working without BSOD's and I need to find out what "erased" my storage hard drives. What should I do?
About Me:
Software Engineer with about 8 years of programming experience. Been building PC's since the late 90's with 20+ builds. I'm pretty honest but my memory isn't so good. I'll answer your questions as best as I can.
Links:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/BIOS_Model.aspx?ProductID=3272
