Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Vista finds no drive

[moriarty]

Got an old Seagate Barracuda SATA 300 Gb that I try to use in my new AMD rig (GA-MA69GM-S2H ie AMD 690G / ATI SB600). BIOS finds the drive and identifies it, but when after Vista installer has loaded and I click the "Install Vista" button I get:

"Windows could not retreive information about disks on this computer"

I'm not trying to use RAID or anything. I can use the "repair vista" button and "load driver" that is present in the same screen but loading the vista drivers provided by Gigabyte won't help me.

This "Press F6 to load RAID drivers" during install thing, is it still left in Vista? And when am I supposed to get (or its equivalent) it if so?

If I understand it correctly, I would neet that feature only if I'm going to use RAID or ACHI. But I've set the SATA controller to "Native IDE" mode (Other options are "RAID", "Legacy IDE" and "SATA->AHCI". I'm not sure my drive supports the latter. Legacy IDE shouldn't be needed (and gets me the same error message - I've tried).

The Gigabyte manual says Vista using "standard OS installation" and the disk itself worked just fine in my other machine running XP. I've tried both Vista 64, Vista 32 and XP. They all seems to have a hard time finding the drive.

Have I missed something? Something obviously wrong? Can someone point me in the right direction?

[SRTDodge05]

I have the p35-ds3r and my sata was set to Legacy IDE, i just change it over to native and turned on AHCI. In so you would need drivers for this. AHCI to me seems that it has spend up my machine a little more.

[3 of 7]

Did you have the drive jumpered for sata 1 on the other machine? you might need to remove the jumper (Just a shot in the dark here)

[moriarty]

Hmm, haven't thought about jumpers at all. It's indeed worth a shot. Right now, shots in the dark are better than no shots at all

Sidenote: Found a thread covering this particaular mobo and one guy had exactly the same behaviour. The fix that did it for him was to make space for the SATA connectors (tight fit with this mobo and certain chassis). I have tried two different ports but will later (at work now) try the other two along with different SATA cables. I've got the same chassis and in order to eliminate the "tight fit issue" I'll remove the mobo completely from the chassis (have to do that anyway just to change SATA port).

[moriarty]

Issue solved. More precisely: the symptoms have been removed. What actually caused this is still unknown.

I removed the mobo from the chassis, tried new SATA cables and ports but it did not help.

However, when I moved the drive back to my old computer things started to happen. The disk had a filesystem and files on it when I removed it from my old computer in the first place. But now it wasn't even found by windows. The disk manager however reported that it existed, but without a functional partition. I imported the drive, created a partition and formatted it.

Back to my new rig and everything worked as one would expect, Vista found the drive and installled smoothly.

So. The drive in question had a filesystem when I put it into my new computer. Somewhere along the way something got messed up causing the partition on the drive to become... corrupt? Something anyway, and it caused Vista to report it could not read data from it.

Come to think of it... the Vista error message did not say it couldn't find the drive. Just that it could not read data from it...

I have not got a clue on what caused all this, and it feels a little bit frustrating not knowing as it might happen again for all that I know. But it's a break through alright.