Hi!
I had to replace a motherboard on a PC with
GA-MA790X-UD4 (
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3002#ov). There were 2 HDD with OS installed and while HDD was working fine, I had trouble installing OS on the other. While trying to figure out what the problem was I discovered that access mode in BIOS for the HDD was set to 'auto' and the only other option was 'Large' (no 'LBA' option was available). At the same time the other HDD (the one working fine) had CHS, LBA and Large options available in BIOS.
I spent a lot of time trying to understand what's wrong with the second HDD until I took a look in the user's manual (the motherboard uses Award BIOS, in my case v. F6) and it turned out that what I was experiencing was an intended behavior:
IDE Channels 0,1 have CHS, LBA and Large options available while IDE Channels 2,3 have only 'Large' option (except 'auto' in both cases).
IDE Channel 0 correspond to IDE connector on motherboard. That leaves only 1 channel (2 SATA ports) that have an 'LBA' access option, and for modern HDD that is the only right option as far as I can understand.
So does that mean that it is not possible to use more that 2 HDD on that motherboard? BIOS 'Auto' option is clearly to working here.
And why are SATA ports randomly mapped to IDE channels? I.e SATA 4 is mapped to IDE Channel 1 Master, SATA 0 is IDE Channel 4 Slave. Coupled with the fact that apparently SATA ports are different on this motherboard this makes things unnecessarily complicated.
Thanks!
