ASUS MB sata ports 5/6 not installed/working

[roryson]

My ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard has 6 sata ports but only 4 are working 1/4. 5/6 support AHCI and RAID mode only and the manual says to make sure to install the drivers but im stuck bigtime. ANy help people..??

[Egren71]

No sure if i am offering you dumb help but here i go anyway.
Make sure the sata ports are turned on in bios. On my motherboard i can individually turn off sata channels.
After a quick search of the web i found this (http://www.w7forums.com/asus-m4n78-pro-sata-driver-issue-windows-7-a-t1389.html) info which seems to imply you need to install some drivers from the nvidia website which seems unlikely to me, however it does say they need to be set right in bois and has a link (http://support.asus.com/Download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=M4N78+Pro&p=1&s=24) to the asus page where you can download the latest drivers, manuals etc. Unfortunately you didn't say what OS you are using but bios setting and drivers are good place to start.
To check where your problem lay you need to check and see if your drives on ports 5/6 are recognized by your bios during boot up or if it is only after boot up that windows doesn't recognize them.

[roryson]

im running win7 32bit m8. only sata ports 1/4 show in my bios m8

[roryson]

Right, ive managed to find the drivers needed but i dont know how to install them, there is a make disk app but i dont have a floppy drive.. any ideas people...??

[Egren71]

Hello
I have just been having a read of your boards manual. Not the most helpful thing in the world.
Two things i would try however are in bios
1. Under Main / Storage configuration make sure OnChip S-ATA Channel is enabled (which i suspect it is)
and
2.set SATA Mode Select to AHCI (make a note of what settings you change as i believe that windows is not fond of drives changing to and from AHCI)
as your manual says ;-
When SATA is configured as [SATA Mode] in BIOS, only SATA port 1-4 can be detected. Ensure to install the AHCI driver to detect and use SATA port 5-6 in AHCI mode under OS.
Save the changes and reboot back into bios and see if you can now see the extra SATA channels as the changes you make in bios will only show up after a reboot.
If this doesn't work then it is possible that the bios is incapable of recognising drives on its own and needs the help of the operating system. In which case you should set your bios settings back how they were, attach something to SATA channel 5 or 6, boot into windows and then try to install the driver from ASUS which should hopeful find your device.
I suspect however that setting SATA Mode to AHCI and rebooting will show up your extra SATA channels.
The problem you will most likely have then is Blue screen of Death or whatever Windows7's equivalent is as the versions of windows i have used don't like switching to AHCI from a different setup. But one step at a time.

[Egren71]

If you follow the link to the ASUS page i posted earlier and select your OS on the download page under Others the second download is for includes the Raid/AHCI driver. If you download it and extract it there is a sub folder in it that has the drivers needed as a straight install.
You would just tell windows under device manager to look for drivers in that folder and it should do the rest itself. Your manual implies that you need to have a device connected to the channel for windows to take an interest in it. I would still check the AHCI setting in bios first as i think that should make them show up in bios as i stated in my previous post.

[roryson]

i have previously tried AHCI mode and my computer would not boot atall..

[roryson]

juat tried AHCI mode again and the bios wont show my ports. looks like its a no go m8....

[cunny]

I think these are only usable in RAID mode. You could setup a RAID 0 (STRIPE) and setup windows on the raid.

If you have a RAID Card you could run a HDD/DVD Rom off this instead of the Ports 5&6

[roryson]

im gonna try that, using a pci sata card..

[Egren71]

I sort of expected windows not to boot if you switched to AHCI as it doesn't like if it wasn't installed on AHCI. The is apparently a way to fix it but it is complicated. The Microsoft solution i think is a reinstall.
I am surprised that the extra ports didn't show up though maybe they do only show up in RAID mode but that is not what manual implies. You would still need to reboot after making the change as the bios is not clever enough to do it on the fly.
If you are going to get a PCI sata card be careful which one you get as some of then do and some don't have a bios, and some have a strange way of incorporating the cards bios into the motherboards boot rom.
Just as a last suggestion have you tried only plugging a drive into port 5 or 6 and setting the bios to AHCI and/or RAID and seeing if the system recognizes the drive as some sata ports have a priority. It just seems a shame add complexity to a system in the form of extra cards when you shouldn't need them. Good luck in whatever solution you choose to go with.

[drawflex]

asus (and maybe other manufs) often isolate 1 or 2 sata ports from the rest and put them on a seperate storage controller (my asus p5b-pro has a main ICH8R raid/sata controller with 4 sata ports and a secondary Marvell 61xx sata controller for another 2)... they do this because if the main controller has a RAID array set up on it, the whole controller goes into raid mode and causes havok for some non-raid sata devices like DVD drives... so you get 2 sata ports on a seperate controller for devices that dont play nice with raid..... i'd bet there's an option in your bios to turn the secondary controller on. You might even get the option to use the secondary controller as another RAID array... but seperate from the main one.

[roryson]

cant find the option m8

[drawflex]

you seen any options for changing between nativeIDE / legacyIDE ? if so, switch over to nativeIDE.. in legacy mode each port needs an IRQ and you run out at 4