I've had that type of problem with the gigabyte board, all the drives had their jumpers set correctly, but it just would not recognize them. Finally I set one of the jumpers, I think on the cd rom, incorrectly, and it all worked perfectly. That's the only actual complaint I had about that board, although it could have been the cdrom drive that was mistaken, hard to say with this stuff.

Until the stuff is recognized in the bios, make sure you don't try to install windows, also make sure the raid is configured correctly if you are using raid harddrives, or if you are using single channel sata drive, make sure it's not set to raid, that won't work since raid requires two drives.
Back to top

Whatever you do, make sure you are not using old ide cables, that can cause this error. If in doubt, get new ones. I had a problem very much like this, mobo/bios would recognize hard drive a and b only sometimes, and then wrong, or not at all.

I tried this and that, different cables I had lying around, no go. Finally I remembered something, don't trust cables if you don't know for sure, I tried a new 40 strand cdrom ide cable, and the mobo recognized it all perfectly, only of course at udma 2, not 5 or whatever it is. (the 40 strand ones are fine for dvd/cd type units, but will cut the speed of modern hard drive in half, always use the fine ones, 80 strand, it's easy to tell them apart. All the round cables are 80 strand.)

What had happened? The first cable I used had been bad, then the second, and I thought working cable, was also bad. This explained something that had been a mystery to me, why I had 3 harddrives fail in about 4 months, all running off that cable. I foolishly thought cables like that don't go bad, luckily the drives were under warranty, but after I got the third one, I didn't use that cable, and haven't had a problem since.

So then I went out and bought myself some brand new round ide cables, which also are better for airflow in the box, and look nicer, they weren't that expensive, only about $15 for a cable, hooked it up, no problems.



Here's a trick, the case fans can be turned on without being mounted, turn the pc on, hold the case fan in your hand, see which way it's blowing. The harddrive one should be blowing into the box, the back one, ideally with these types of powerful processors you have at least 2 case fans, should be blowing out of the case.

The antec cases I've used have pop in fans, really nice feature, so changing direction is pretty easy, especially with the pull in and out harddrive enclosure.

In case anyone is wondering, the heatsink/cpu fan blows down, into the heatsink, that's to dissipate the heat better. I met a guy who told me that if you mount a standard case fan ontop of the cpu fan, it makes the computer much quieter, but you have to get the right sized fans of course. Haven't tried that myself.

Anyway, just my two cents, learned from painful experience..



That's a good recomnendation, matthewHSE, that's the kind of thing it's easy not to think about, but building your own box helps you become aware of what's actually inside it.
Back to top

Thanks guys.

I have an inkling I know what it might be, but I'm going to wait until morning to check it out. If it's what I think it is, I'll be back here very, very red-faced.
Back to top

Just a quick update. The problem I had with BIOS not recognizing the HD turned out -- after a few hours of chaning settings and searching all support stuff -- not to be a problem at all, basically because the Gigabyte board does not recognize SATA drives in BIOS.

After futzing around with it to no end I finally gave up and started the W2K installation again. Everything went smoothly. Well, except I couldn't install the ITE RAID drivers, but I'm not planning on using RAID so decided not to hit my head against that wall.

One important point is that the "Press F6" to install the HD drivers comes up very early in the W2K install routine -- if you blink, you miss it.

Well, I've been spending quite a few hours installing and updating drivers, downloading all the necessary MS updates for W2K and Office and getting other programs and browsers loaded on. Next step, maybe this afternoon or this evening, is to get all the docs transferred over from the old machine. Maybe by tomorrow or so I'll be ready to really give this new box a good test drive.
Back to top

That's right, sorry, I forgot that the SATA drivers are installed during windows, so you won't see them in the BIOS.

I don't have this particular box in front of me so I try to do it from memory, but as we all know, memory isn't very reliable when it comes to tech stuff.

Let us know how it turns out, you should be pleased I think.

And of course, always read all of the directions, a lot of these types of errors happen from not completely reading the instructions, one reason I particularly like Gigabyte boards is that they have excellent documentation, but it's a lot of reading.

I've always had pretty good success with this stuff because when it's a new board or system I read all of the booklets before starting, it's time consuming, but it's saved me a lot of errors. And my memory really doesn't work very reliable with this stuff, to put it mildly, so I don't count on it much.

I do seem to remember that there is a secondary, SATA bios loaded, that you can also boot into, but just read the SATA raid booklet you got with the board and it will tell you how to get into it and all that.
Back to top

Got caught up doing some real work the past few days so could only intermittently revisit my project.

Finally got all my files transferred over from my old machine to the new. Had a couple of networking glitches here and there that stalled me, but managed to work them out step by step. Have the old and new machines sitting side-by-side and using a KVM switch to run both. It's a nice setup to make a transition. And I found that the cheapest KVM switch I could find is made just as well, if not better, and performs as good as the more expensive ones.

There were a couple of programs that I had wanted to move over for which I no longer had the downloaded executables; nothing important, but figured Why not? Spent a few hours with a copy of a very popular transfer program and decided that it ain't worth the effort for one or two insignificant programs. No matter what settings I chose and which files I wanted to carry over, the danged thing still insisted on transferring a lot of very unrelated stuff -- not just shared system files and such, but even executables for other programs. Decided to just leave these couple of apps behind.

Now the good news!
This sucker is fast! I use FrontPage for most web work and just made a change to a page that is included on all 2,500 others. On my old machine saving that change would take more than 5 minutes. The new machine had the change saved in 3 seconds. I think I'm going to be a very happy camper.

Thanks folks. Truly great to have some handholding during a project like this.

As soon as I'm sure everything is stable I'm going to gut the old box and start on another build!
Back to top