GA-G31M-ES2L/e5200 Troubleshooting advice please

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Mon May 11, 2009 6:26 pm

I don't understand what is going with this system so here are the hardware details:
New:
GA-G31M-ES2L
e5200
Crucial 2 gigs DDR2-800
SeaSonic SS-350ES PS

Recycled:
120 gig WD PATA HD
LG PATA CD Burner

This is the second mobo in a week. Board #1 would not detect any PATA devices (tried 2 known good CD/DVD drive and 2 know good HD's). I swapped out processors, ram and power supplies. Contacted Newegg and got an RMA.

Received #2 and I have spent 3 hours fighting the same thing. On the initial boot the mobo saw the PATA devices so I went into the bios, turned on SMART, changed the boot order and some other minor things. Saved, shut down and restarted to find the same thing as last time... no detect the PATA devices. I went into the bios and tried the fail safe and the optimal settings and still nothing changed. Then I swapped in a known good SATA HD with a good XPPro install and booted it into "Safe Mode" on the SATA HD. Shut down, disconnected the SATA drive, went back to the PATA and nothing changed. I tried the CD/HD devices in cable select as well as master/slave configuration without luck.

In the 15 years I have been building machines I have never encountered a problem like this. I know that I could go SATA but I don't have the money to make the transition right now.

Thanks in advance for your time!
Travis

JamieG · Post by **JamieG** » Mon May 11, 2009 8:00 pm

I've got the same mobo and CPU combination as you, but all SATA devices for me. I've never tried any PATA devices before on it.

As an aside, the mobo only detected my CPU at a 9x multiplier for the E5200, not the 12.5x that the CPU is normally rated at. However, since I planned on underclocking and undervolting it, it didn't bother me and I haven't done anything else with the system since. It just makes me think that there might be something a bit funky with the BIOS.

Have you checked to see if there is a newer BIOS revision out? The one that came with my board was revision F6 from memory.

Have you tried booting with both SATA and PATA devices attached and checking the BIOS to see if they are all discovered? Maybe try booting into windows from your SATA HDD with a PATA HDD and/or CD burner attached and see if windows can see them or not despite them not showing up in BIOS.

Sorry, all that I can think of at this stage.

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Tue May 12, 2009 4:07 am

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try that later today.

Also, I swapped in a different PATA cable and added a video card. I will try removing the card and go from there.

Riffer · Post by **Riffer** » Tue May 12, 2009 4:09 am

Maybe do you have the SATA configured as IDE mode or something like that?

Is the IDE on a seperate controller? Maybe it has to be enabled and drivers installed.

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Tue May 12, 2009 4:58 am

Another variable considered. I pulled a LG PATA DVD burner out of my external enclosure and tried it. Same problem of not finding the device.

I tried all of the bios options that control PATA/SATA functionality. I cannot get it to boot from a Windows XP install or Ubuntu live CD in the DVD drive.

PATA/IDE is on a separate chip (IT8718), which according to the user's manual, control the Keyboard/mouse/serial/parallel ports. From what I can tell the keyboard is working OK.

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Tue May 12, 2009 10:36 am

Any other suggestions? I don't want to do another RMA and foot the shipping but this just is not right...

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Wed May 13, 2009 11:15 am

So I decided to play the game and dumped the PATA drives. I grabbed a 160gig SATA3.0 HD and the SATA DVD burner from the HTPC and gave it a whirl. I tweaked the bios and was on my way. Recovered the data from the PATA HD and put it on the new drive.

Is the problem solved?