sata raptor incompatibility

[telemachus]

I've just put together the system listed in my sig and i''ve been pulling my hair out trying to work out what exactly has been causing my system to hang on powerup. Everything was fine for a day, I installed XP and updated all the neccesary drivers etc, i then powered down for the night (i'd only restarted throughout the day, no full power downs and cold boots), and in the morning i couldn't even reach the bios, no video was being output and the 4 motherboard lights were all lit up. After perusing your fine forum (hello all by the way ) I began to note problems mentioned with s12 seasonics with increasing dread, but after further tinkering I found rather oddly that as soon as the sata connector between the raptor and board was disconnected I got to the bios fine (no further, Xp was installed to the raptor).

 

This happens on all the sata connectors on the board with the raptor (maxtor is fine on all of them), and there's no problem if the raptor is connected to a power lead and not a sata connector (i'd wondered wether it was tipping the seasonic over the edge on bootup), so i'm seriously lost at this point, i've seen dozens of hard drives over the years mess up a system booting to the OS (corrupted boot tables and os installs etc) but i've never seen on that stops all video and the system from posting just by being connected :confused: , at worst i'd expect the motherboard to not pick it up or something. Has anyone got a clue what's going on, is it simply a case of a seriously messed up raptor interfering with my whole system that I need to return? Any suggestions greatly apreciated, this has really been confusing.

[lowboy]

Have you tried putting 2sec delay on hdd's in bios mine would hang sometimes till the delay.

[michaelng]

Hi Telemachus,

 

I have the same setup as you do. I have no problem with my WD Raptor. But I have a huge problem with the diamond max 10 sata 300gb. Diamond max sucks in my opinion and I would never buy one again. Have you disconnected all other drives and test? such as your cd-rom or any usb memory card reader. The board seems to be sensitive to memory card reader as I have experienced. Mine wouldn't boot if the memory card reader is in the bios boot order.

 

If your diamond max works now, don't expect it to be stable. Mine initially worked then when I was copying a few large file --- pooofffff, the drive was gone - disappear s. I had to reactivate it in windows.

 

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9496

 

I wouldn't be surprise if the DM10 was the culprit. Try disconnecting the DM10 and use the WD raptor instead?

[wevsspot]

I also use a 2 second hdd delay for my Raptors in RAID0.

 

I had similar problems, seems that the drives were spinning up too fast for the BIOS to keep up. 2 second delay solved my problem. Oddly enough, after about 30 days of use, changed the delay back to zero and my system is purring along. I attribute it to the DFI gremlins.

[telemachus]

Thanks for all the advice guys, the hard disk delay seems to have cured the worst of my problems, finally got to windows, which was a pleasant change , i'd just totally overlooked the drives causing any error other than not showing up or not booting the OS correctly.

 

There's just one more thing i'd apreciate enlightenment on, once I shutdown (even from inside windows) I often get the two green motherboard lights flashing on and off rapidly (one of thems the one that remains on when powered down with the psu turned on and plugged in), when this happens I can't power on and I usually have to turn the psu off for a few minutes and then when switched back onthe green lights reamin solid and everything powers up, any idea what's going on here?

[red930]

Search the nF4 power supply thread for advice on the Seasonic power supply.

 

Thanks for all the advice guys, the hard disk delay seems to have cured the worst of my problems, finally got to windows, which was a pleasant change , i'd just totally overlooked the drives causing any error other than not showing up or not booting the OS correctly.

 

There's just one more thing i'd apreciate enlightenment on, once I shutdown (even from inside windows) I often get the two green motherboard lights flashing on and off rapidly (one of thems the one that remains on when powered down with the psu turned on and plugged in), when this happens I can't power on and I usually have to turn the psu off for a few minutes and then when switched back onthe green lights reamin solid and everything powers up, any idea what's going on here?

[telemachus]

Thanks, I had a look through the thread and saw a moderator post that the s12's stability problems were cleared up with the A02 revision (which mine is) so I thought it was possibly something else.