asus p5w dh ide+sata = impossible? to funny...

T

tongue_of_colicab

Veteran
To describe. This is going to be a question on how to fix this as much as I need to complain about the stupidity of the board/bios as I need to get it out of my system after trying to get it working for more than 3 hours.

Oke I bought this board because I heard alot of good things about it. Hooked everything up, installed 1 ide hdd to install windows on (Actually it could boot perfectly from my existing windows even though that was for a AMD system). So I did, installed windows and it worked fine right away for a change. Well, atleast I thought because that is where the hurting starts.

I also got a second ide disk I only use for data storage. I hooked it up exactly the same way as I did in my old system and booted... No master IDE deteced. WTF? retard, you only got one master disk, you only got one windows install just take that disk dont take the slave disk (another nice thing btw, seagate actually doesnt have a slave jumper on their disk, really nice....) anyway moved the cable/jumpers a bit and it worked. Nice.

Next up was installing my 2 sata disk only used for data storage. On my old system when I got them (also with the 2 ide disk for windows and storage) I could just plug them in and they worked right away, no questions asked, it just worked. You got to love Nforce based boards.

But not for Asus. Oh no. God do I hate this company. I dont know what they pay whoever is making their bios but every penny is a penny wasted because its a horrible piece of shit. How freaking hard can it be to build a bios that just works right away when you hook up 2 sata disks?

It just wont work. When you hook them up at first it will just hang at the lame jmicron checking disks screen. I managed to get rid of that and now the really fun thing comes. It keeps having this cant find primairy ide disk thing which is absolutely complete retared. It only recognizes the sata disk, the ide disk just seems to be gone. But the funny part is that the sata disk in the bios actually is a primairy slave so why the hell cant is see my ide disk anymore?

I got the sata disks on port 3 and 4 like the manual says and I played around with the bios options (why the fuck should you have to change bios settings to begin with just to hook up a hdd?) like setting the options mode to P-ATA and S-ATA instead of just one of the two but nothing helps. You can only use ide or sata it seem which ofcourse is stupid because im sure there is a way to use both but I certainly have no idea how the hell asus thinks I should do that.

Does anyone have any idea how to get it working?
 
I tried every combination. My psu isnt the problem as its 480watt.

But I figured out whats wrong about 30 minutes ago. The board has 2 ide connections, a black one and a blue one. I read the manual and somewhere it says use the black one for your ide disks. So I did. But you actually have to connect your hdd's to the blue connector before the bios sees them correctly.
 
Good you got it fixed at last. Hope it stays fixed too (not a certainty with PCs).

Sorry about the mental anguish though. ASUS used to be great once I remember.
Peace.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Good you got it fixed at last. Hope it stays fixed too (not a certainty with PCs).

Sorry about the mental anguish though. ASUS used to be great once I remember.
Peace.
Click to expand...

Well it didnt stay fixed. I came home today and the screen was black and the whole computer didnt do anything anymore. Also resetting didnt work, didnt got anything but a black screen. At first I thought the whole damn thing died on me but a bios reset fixes the booting but now I have to reset the bios everytime before I can boot. Still havnt figured out why the hell that happens.
 
Dude, just save yourself the pain and return the board.. :cool:

What is considerefd great today? I remember Tyan was considered special but do they even exist today? I don't remember hearing anything about them for years and yeards now.

Gigabyte maybe?

Intel certainly. Thwir stuff is great. But not overclocking friendly as I reclal. Maybe tyhey have enthusiast type boards today.

Gopood luck!

Peace.
 
Thats what I probably end up doing but the problem is I bought it only so I have to ship it, that takes time and those webshops usually take their freaking sweet time returning you a working part.

I guess I have to demand from the shop that they send me a new one right away as its basically DOA.

But still it pisses me off, how can it happen that you need to reset the bios everytime? I changed the battery, flashed the bios again but it all doesnt make any difference.
 
The P5W-DH is a disgrace. In finally got rid of that piece of shit and bought a Gigabyte P35-DQ6, which works like a charm. For fucks sake, people are even modding old P5W BIOSes to add support for new CPUs because all BIOS updates Asus released in recent months have been buggy as hell.

I could rant on for pages about this utter piece of junk, and about Asus's product policy in general, but I'm done with that company and I will never look back. So why bother?
 
how is your optical drive connected ?
put your sata on 1+3
bios settings: compatible ? enhanced pata, enhanced sata or enhanced pata+sata ?
 
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Dangit I just bought an ASUS not to long ago too since Abit went bankrupt (they were my choice before) and people were saying how nice ASUS was.

Oh well no problems as yet, but no weird things to try yet either.
 
Sxotty said:
Dangit I just bought an ASUS not to long ago too since Abit went bankrupt (they were my choice before) and people were saying how nice ASUS was.

Oh well no problems as yet, but no weird things to try yet either.
Click to expand...

You mean Abit back in 2006 when USI bought them or is there something more recent? They're still pumping out boards and support for them so not sure what you mean it wasnt an option.
 
Sxotty said:
Dangit I just bought an ASUS not to long ago too since Abit went bankrupt (they were my choice before) and people were saying how nice ASUS was.

Oh well no problems as yet, but no weird things to try yet either.
Click to expand...

The sad thing is... they can't even get something as basic as cooling to work properly nowadays. The P5W DH is plagued by a south bridge that runs too hot because the board's huge copper heat-pipe construction simply doesn't work.

And It's not like they've learned from their mistakes:
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/news.php?tid=789291&starttime=0&endtime=0
 
I've got the same motherboard and I have IDE optical drive and 5 SATA drives connected to it. It does have a "few" problems but once I got those to work they have worked perfectly for me for almost a year now. It had some major problems with Maxtor SATA drives and I couldn't get them to work even with added PCI SATA controller, though that was supposed to be more of the fault of the drive than the motherboard. At the moment there are two things I'm missing:
1) possibility to modify core voltage
2) ability to flash BIOS within BIOS using USB stick

I managed the latter once but not again after that, it just freezes at the place it should read the data from the drive. As I don't have FDD or Windows it is kind of difficult to flash BIOS :)
 
I have a Gigabyte P35-DS3R and 965P-DS3. Both are pretty decent boards and work just fine stock. The P35 is a bit happier when it comes time to do my usual overclocking obsession, but it was just a matter of patience finding the happy spots with the 965P and E4300 combo. The boards and BIOSs are obviously related, with both boards looking very similar and the BIOS settings nearly the same. I like all the pretty aluminum caps and fancier whirlygig doodad ferrite thingies!

When I go mobo lookin, I try to stick to boards with just the basics. I have a little theory of my own that says the value added shit that these companies add is not worth any extra money. It's all cheap, half working junk most of the time. The copper heatpipe cooling on the more expensive boards is neat, but I've heard/read that some of those aren't very well engineered and are more for looks. Stick to the basics and get addon cards if you need something like WiFi, say.

My mobo shopping research strategy usually consists of a trip to XtremeSystems.org forum and seeing what the crazy overclockers over there are happy with. You get some pretty in-depth looks into those boards from those folks.

Intel 975X is a good chipset, but it sure sounds like ASUS can't write a BIOS anymore. I built a comp at work with a cheapo ASUS P5L-MX that works ok (picky with RAM tho). 945G chipset there, but it can run a C2D perfectly fine.\

I've read that the Abit P35 boards are decent. I think they're making good stuff but I haven't bought an Abit board for myself since my Abit BF6 440BX.
 
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Davros said:
hoho you can flash the bios within the bios from the hdd
Click to expand...
Do I have to create a FAT partition for this? Will I have to create the partition on a specific drive and partition or can it find the correct one from anywhere? Anything else I should know before I try it?

As for voltages, I only have [auto] and I cannot set it to anything else as it doesn't list any other options there. I can change every other voltage besides the core one though. I'd be really glad if I could fix it, I hope that BIOS upgrade would do it as mine is from last October if I remember correctly and there have been lots of updates since :)
 
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