Re: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe problem

William wrote:
"Don" <razafi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:7a106a86-34b2-4091-8c53-89b8732a0534@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi William and Paul,
Thanks for your replies.

Paul,
I cannot do anything because I cannot access the Setup BIOS.
It's freezing to detect the 4th Master and that's it, nothing more.

William,

I did what you suggested:
- unplugged everything,
- except the 1G memory and the Video Card
- remove the CMOS battery for 10 min.
- restart the system from cold boot

And I am having the following, on screen:

AMIBIOS (C) 2006 American Megatrends, Inc.
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe ACPI BIOS Revision 1305
CPU : Intel (R) Core(TM) 2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86Ghz
Speed : 1.86 GHz Count : 2

Entering SETUP ..
Press F8 For BBS POPUP
PC2-5300 Dual Channel Interleaved
Initializing USB Controllers .. Done
1024MB
USB Devices(s): 1 Hub, 4 Storage Devices
Auto-Detecting 4th Master.. <-- freezing here

Still my question: what and where is this "4th Master" device
coming from ?

Cheers,
Don.


Don: You should be seeing "Press Delete to Enter BIOS" on the bottom of the screen before/while you see "Entering SETUP". If you see "Press F8 for BBS POPUP" you are already past BIOS and onto starting the operating system. Something is wrong here.

William


"Entering SETUP" is the response you get, when you press
Delete early in POST, and the BIOS accepts the key press.
Drive recognition runs to completion, before the BIOS setup
screen appears. Drive recognition is necessary, so that the
BIOS setup screen can fully populate the drive information
fields with the string(s) extracted from the drives.

The "Master/Slave" terminology should be associated
with the Southbridge ports. Based on what I see in the
manual, it suggests a SATA port is trying to do something.
Like SATA3.

SATA1 should be Third Master.
(SATA2 would only be detected if something was connected to SIL4723 ports.)
SATA3 should be Fourth Master
SATA4 should be Fourth Slave.

This is based on what I see in the downloadable PDF manual for
P5W DH Deluxe.

So something is up with SATA3. And the situation is kinda
Catch22, as you cannot attempt to disable any drive interfaces,
without getting past the freezing. So maybe a port is blown,
and blown in such a way as to prevent the completion of
POST.

Is everything now disconnected from the SATA connectors ?

Paul

.

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