New
#11
OK, one problem gone
I stripped down my system to barebones and found the long boot went away. Adding items 1-by-1 found the front panel card reader caused the boot hangup at the "Starting Windows" screen when plugged into the USB header. I disabled that legacy USB drive search option in the BIOS and that fixed it.
Thank you jnorris, I'd buy you a big a$$ beer if I could. That problem was driving me batty, especially since I did the clean install. Do you have any idea how many times you have to reboot when you are setting up drivers and apps???!! At 2.5 minutes per reboot it was taking forever!
Now, back to the SMART problem. I successfully switched from IDE to AHCI mode on my system. Through all of the reboots that I've gone through with the setup, I have not seen the SMART error. Right now, I'm running the SATA controller with the Win7 default driver.
The only difference in hardware setup between now and before is that my SATA optical drive is now on SATA_4 in my attempt to get the optical drive to boot Win7 setup DVD. With the GA-MA785G-UD3H, SATA_4 and SATA_5 can be set to IDE mode while SATA_0 through SATA_3 are set to AHCI. So right now, I have all hard drives connected to the 0-3 ports in AHCI mode and the optical drive on SATA_4 in IDE mode. One of my hard drives is the same 1TB WD black drive that your are having problems with. When I was seeing the SMART errror, all drives including the optical drive were on 0-3 in AHCI mode. Maybe the optical drive was affecting hard drive detection on the same controller? Do you have a SATA optical drive on the AHCI controller?
Another thing to consider is that I noticed in the power options, there is an option that by default has the hard drives spin down after 20 minutes. Have you turned this off? With all my setup activities, I don't think I ever let my system sit long enough to spin down the drives and that may be why I haven't seen the SMART error.
Also, I'm pretty sure that before I was using the ATI SATA driver for the SATA controller and as I said before I have left it at the default Win7 SATA driver for now. Maybe the ATI driver has a bug that is causing the SMART error. I'm not sure I can keep using the default driver because on my previous installation my non-boot hard drives would disappear when resuming from S3 sleep and the ATI driver fixed that.
Last edited by rwpritchett; 11 Nov 2009 at 13:02.