SATA driver issue w/ Win 7 and Gigabyte GA-MA785G-UD3H

[jnorris]

Using Win 7 64-bit with AMD SATA drivers with a strange issue.

When this board boots up it does an AHCI initialization which shows the attached sata drives. After that, Windows 7 loads and runs without a problem. However, when I reboot Windows it sounds like the hard drives spin speed is slowing down then speeding up again. It does this about 4 times then the computer shuts down. When the computer restarts and goes back to the AHCI init screen it now shows "S.M.A.R.T. Error", but Windows boots without a problem. If the computer is shut down (powered off) the next boot will not show the error.

I've had Windows 7RC 32-bit, and currently also have XP-64 and XP-32 partitions on this machine with no problems at all. If I set the machine to Native IDE instead of AHCI everything goes back to normal with no shutdown issues.

Any ideas?

 

[Tyson64]

Have you Disabled the S.M.A.R.T. in your Bios.

 

[Wayward]

I'm having almost the exact same problem with a Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P using the AMD 9.10 AHCI driver.

The computer will start from a cold boot just fine. However, if I restart, it hangs at "AHCI Drive Init" and shows SMART errors on all HDDs except the boot HD. That's as far as it gets; I have to hit the reset button, and then it will boot normally.

I don't have this problem with the Microsoft driver, but it has the disadvantage of booting very slowly.

 

[jnorris]

I'm thinking there's a problem with the Windows 7 64-bit driver. I haven't had any issues with WinXP 32 or 64-bit or with Windows 7 RC 32-bit. It appears that the driver isn't shutting down the controller properly and it's setting some kind of flag in the drives S.M.A.R.T. tables. The flag seems to clear on a cold boot. My system boots normally even with the error.

I haven't found that the MS drivers loaded slowly, but it seems the POST takes longer to complete when the controller is set to Native IDE. Although, when it's set to AHCI you have to wait for the AHCI init to finish and then wait for the Press CTRL-A prompt to go to the AHCI controller screen (which is absolutely useless anyway). So it's 6 of one and half-dozen of the other.

I don't sense any performance hit from using the Native IDE setting.

 

[rwpritchett]

Same here, same motherboard

I am also having a problem with a hard drive in AHCI mode hanging on boot, then giving a "S.M.A.R.T. Error". This is on a Gigabyte GA-MA785G-UD3H and the hard drive is a Western Digital 10EACS. I know it does this on reboot, I'm not certain if a cold boot does the same.

Western Digital's utility and SpeedFan analyze the drive and say the SMART data is OK.

I'm also experiencing a really long boot time that may be unrelated. When the "Starting Windows" text comes up, it takes about 45-60 seconds before the windows logo shows up and starts to pulse and I can hear the hard drive activity start up at that time.

I've updated my BIOS, tried different drivers, and even attempted a system restore but the problems won't go away. I built this system on Saturday and everything was fine. Both problems started on Sunday when I was fine-tuning this fresh system with updates, apps, etc. IDE mode does not have the SMART error, but the long boot time is still there. I need AHCI for eSATA hot plug anyways.

I think I will scap the whole thing and do a clean install tomorrow morning to see if the problems go away. If anyone figures out what the problem is, please post back here to help out the group.

 

[Frostmourne]

Why don't you use native IDE? Isn't AHCI used for hotplugging hard drives?

 

[jnorris]

Rwpritchett indicated he wanted to hot-plug his eSata drive.

There is some wacky stuff going on with this board, though. It seems like the drive (a WD Black 1TB) takes a long time to spin up when it's attached to this motherboard, and it does take a long time for the system to complete its POST and get to the Win7 boot manager screen. I've come to accept it though, because the system is fast, stable and responsive once it's booted. This board also took a long time to settle in - as ridiculous as it sounds. I've been building systems since the early nineties and have noticed that many components have to acclimate to their environment before they start working reliably.

My previous board, a MachSpeed MSNV-939, which only had SATA I, didn't show any of these peculiarities - it had its own bunch of issues (noisy chipset fan, no USB boot, etc.). I'm using the same power supply so I'm thinking the slow drive spin-up is related to the motherboard.

 

[rwpritchett]

SATA controller....

I attempted to do a clean install this morning. I was unsuccessful installing Windows 7 with the controller set to AHCI. My optical drive would not boot to the disc unless I set the controller to native IDE so I installed Win7 in IDE mode. I'll have to jump through some hoops later to switch to AHCI mode. I ran out of time this morning so I don't know if the S.M.A.R.T. error is still there.

The long boot time is still a problem even with the clean install. I timed it... 65 seconds just sitting there doing nothing, which makes my total boot time around 2 1/2 minutes.

Tomorrow, I'm going to attempt a number of things:

#1 Boot to a SATA addon card with the GA-MA785G-UD3H SATA controller disabled.

#2 Clone my fresh install to my 1TB WD black drive and see if its my hard drive that is causing the problems.

jnorris- What BIOS are you using? I'm using F4, and I think my problems started after updating the BIOS. I might try to roll back to F3 and see if that solves the S.M.A.R.T. error and long boot problems. Maybe the GA-MA785G-UD3H has problems? I can't find anyone else having these issues though. I'd hate to RMA this board, it has everything I need.

 

[jnorris]

2.5 minutes is a long boot, but I don't think it's the BIOS. I'm using F4 too, and have noticed no longer boot times due to it. As a matter of fact I updated from F3 in order to see if boot times improved - they didn't (although next to yours, my boot time is relatively speedy).

A few things you might want to try...
Turn off Enable Legacy USB (I think that's what it's called) support - this will keep the motherboard from searching for and enabling USB drives during boot. This has the unfortunate side effect of disabling booting to USB drives. Also, if you've got a USB hard drive attached to the system disconnect the USB cable - even if it's turned off.

It sounds like the system board is booting OK, but something attached to the system is taking a long time to initialize. Disconnect or disable any extraneous hardware (sound, add-in cards, etc.) to see if you find a culprit.

Disable any unused ports in the BIOS like serial, parallel, or firewire.

See if any of it helps.

 

[Wayward]

A couple of things that may help your boot times: If you are not using the PATA connection or a floppy drive, disable them in the BIOS.

 

[rwpritchett]

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.

 

[jnorris]

I'm glad I could help with your boot-time issue. I know how frustrating it is trying to troubleshoot something like that. It appears that Gigabyte has issues with USB devices at boot, there are a number of references to them on various websites

I don't have any SATA opticals, just two PATAs. What is the Microsoft driver that you're using for the WD Black? I'd like to try something other than the AMD. By the way, the Gigabyte site shows a new driver released on 11/5/09, but the drivers contained in the download seem to be the same ones that were previously released - they are dated May of '09.

I have to tell you, I do like this motherboard, but I find it's little pecadillos needlessly frustrating.

 

[jnorris]

I used the "Standard AHCI 1.0 Sata Controller" driver and the drives shut down properly now with AHCI enabled in the BIOS. I guess the AMD driver is not quite there yet.

Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions.

 

[woohoo]

I hav the same problem as well. HDD idle for 15 secs during windows 7 boot screen using windows AHCI drivers

tried AMD drivers but HDD clicks 5 times before power is turned off at shutdown. I think it was the cause of my brand new seagate failing. Had to take it to the shops and get a new one. I recommend sticking with the windows AHCI drivers until AMD fixes these drivers.

 

[Youebe]

Ma78gpm-ds2h

I was having the same issue with my Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H and 2 Seagate. I also have removed the AMD HDD driver and it worked for me as well. Thanks Guys...

 

[poisonsnak]

Same problem on GA-MA790GP-DS4H with the AMD AHCI driver on Win7 Pro x64.

The problem here (I think) is as jnorris said at the start of the thread "It sounds like the hard drives spin speed is slowing down then speeding up again."

When you cold boot the hard drives spin up as soon as the power supply turns on, and they are all running by the time the AHCI BIOS starts looking for them.

When you restart, for some reason AMD's AHCI driver tells the hard drives to spin down (why???). When the AHCI BIOS starts up, it tells the hard drives to spin up but it uses staggered spin-up. By the time (in my case) your third hard drive gets the command to spin up, the AHCI BIOS is tired of waiting and throws a SMART error for "spin up time too long" (or whatever it is).

Like everyone else in the thread, switched back to the MS driver. Thanks guys!

 

[trond]

I happened to have the exact same problem too, and came upon this thread while googling for solutions.

I have a GA-MA790FXT-UD5P with 6 HDDs connected, 4 in hot-swap bays, to the AMD SB750 chipset SATA ports using AHCI mode. I installed Windows 7 with the AMD AHCI drivers, and as everyone else here, from a cold boot, the AMD AHCI bios detects the drives fine, but when rebooting Windows 7 the AMD AHCI driver spins the drives down, and they don't spin up again until the AHCI BIOS tries to detect the drives, upon which they all get a S.M.A.R.T. failure (from spinning up too late, I assume).

I'm not sure this has any negative effect, though if this failure is reported in the drives S.M.A.R.T. constantly, perhaps it adds to a value that in turn will end up giving a permanent S.M.A.R.T. failure because it has happened too many times.

As previous poster, what I don't get is, why do the AMD AHCI driver spin the drives down when doing a reboot? Or when shutting down Windows 7 for that matter (when the computer finally powers off, the drives do too anyway)? The only reason I can see the need for the drives to spin down, is when you select to eject them for hot-swapping (the AMD AHCI driver does this). That's the only need for the drives to be powered off while the computer is still running.

Thanks to this thread, I solved the problem too, by using the standard Microsoft AHCI driver. However, the standard Microsoft AHCI driver does not power the drives off if you select to eject them (so you might want to wait till the drive has spun down before you remove it from the bay proper), and what's also a slight annoyance, the Microsoft AHCI driver does not spin up and autodetect drives when you hot-swap them. You'll have to scan for hardware changes for a new drive to turn up. Atleast the AMD AHCI driver did that automatically.

 

[sonyb]

I to had the same problem but with the microsoft sata driver the boot time is very slow. So i tried to download the 9.12 ahci driver from ati homepage, you can not install the driver through the installer itself and on the ati homepage they say it is only recommended to use that driver if you use a retail amd motherboard only.
Still all the drivers comes from amd and the only thing i think that gigabyte or other vendors do is to try the driver and see that it really works with the product before they release it. So i thought that i would do my own testings so i extracted the installation files to my desktop and then installed it manually through the device manager and voila! now i have the newest driver for the ahci and the problem is fixed. I have had no problem at all with this driver so i recommend you guys to do the same, and win7 boots up fast . Download the ahci driver here: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?driver=Integrated/vista32-chipset and extract it to the desktop or wherever you want. Enter the devicemanager and open up the ide ata atapi controllers and there you choose the sata controller and choose to update driver and link it to the place where you have extracted the 9.12 ahci directory. In my case= C:\Users\Tony\Desktop\9-12_vista32-64_ahci\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\AHCI\LH64A and there you have the amdsata.inf driver so just install and reboot the computer and then you are done. Probably you guys already know how to do this but i just wanted to help them who didn't, and please excuse my english im a swedish dude and my english is getting kind of rusty. Best Regards //Tony

 

[Frostmourne]

I to had the same problem but with the microsoft sata driver the boot time is very slow. So i tried to download the 9.12 ahci driver from ati homepage, you can not install the driver through the installer itself and on the ati homepage they say it is only recommended to use that driver if you use a retail amd motherboard only.
Still all the drivers comes from amd and the only thing i think that gigabyte or other vendors do is to try the driver and see that it really works with the product before they release it. So i thought that i would do my own testings so i extracted the installation files to my desktop and then installed it manually through the device manager and voila! now i have the newest driver for the ahci and the problem is fixed. I have had no problem at all with this driver so i recommend you guys to do the same, and win7 boots up fast . Download the ahci driver here: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?driver=Integrated/vista32-chipset and extract it to the desktop or wherever you want. Enter the devicemanager and open up the ide ata atapi controllers and there you choose the sata controller and choose to update driver and link it to the place where you have extracted the 9.12 ahci directory. In my case= C:\Users\Tony\Desktop\9-12_vista32-64_ahci\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\AHCI\LH64A and there you have the amdsata.inf driver so just install and reboot the computer and then you are done. Probably you guys already know how to do this but i just wanted to help them who didn't, and please excuse my english im a swedish dude and my english is getting kind of rusty. Best Regards //Tony

That would work but I'm using the built in AMD driver and it loads perfectly, roughly 3 or 4 seconds to initialize and load. Its an Gigabyte MA 790GPT-UD3H.

 

[Trevence]

AHCI SATA S.M.A.R.T. Error

Credit to Sonyb! I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H. I did an installation of the AMD AHCI installer that I downloaded from AMD website. I verified that it was installed successfully (device manager) BUT I was still getting the S.M.A.R.T. error message. So I did what Sonyb suggested, which was to install the driver via device manager (update driver option) and it booted without any glitch. Thanks!