I have been having a nightmare installing a 500 GB SATA HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10) that I recently purchased. I have been experiencing serious issues installing it on my Asus K8N (non-deluxe) Nforce3 motherboard. The drive was displaying strange behavior since the first install of Windows XP SP2 that attempted: e.g. system hangs/restarts 5 seconds into windows after reboot from Nforce3 chipset driver install, system would not boot into windows and stays at black screen after POST screen, hanging at XP welcome screen, and most recently, system restarts during Nforce3 driver install. What was even more frustrating was that I returned the drive to Canada Computers in a panic (as the 7 day return policy was in effect) and swapped to a Western Digital Caviar and experienced the exact same issues. At that point I was convinced it was a motherboard/Sata compatibility issue.
[b]My system[/b]
Asus K8N Motherboard
Sempron 3000+
2x256MB Samsung DDR300 Ram
Sapphire 9600
[b]Background Information[/b]
-Asus K8N only supports SATA I but SATA should be backwards compatible. However, I have jumpered the drive to force SATA I compatibility
-Ran memory tests and Seagate Seatools HDD Test, both passed without errors detected
-Tested the system with a more powerful PSU
-I have updated the motherboard BIOS as recent releases have been reported to fix SATA HDD detection bugs
-Installed the third party chipset ide drivers before installing XP
None of the above solutions worked. However, the drive works fine when installed as a slave drive to my original IDE drive. After some investigation, I found out that this was somewhat of a known issue. It was discovered that SATA drives and Nforce motherboards don't get along- issue with the drive's Native Command Queuing. A solution that has worked for some was to disable this feature in the device manager but this has not helped.
I have yet to solve this issue. The only things I have not tried yet are updating the HDD's firmware and trying a PCI SATA controller card.
If anyone has any ideas or knows of this issue, I'd appreciate any comments you may have.
Evan