[solved] Asus P8H61-M LE Mobo not playing nice with SATA drives.

[Village Idiot]

Long story short, it's a nice board with a Core i5 4gig ram. On board video. But it hates SATA drives.

The default setting in the BIOS for "SATA mode" is "IDE mode"

This wont allow either LXDE.2011.06 or the 64bit test3.iso to boot. It drops the boot device and craps out deep into the boot sequence.

So I can boot with a liveusb. But the ATA drives don't show up. And I can't burn a CD.

Changing  BIOS SATA mode to "AHCI mode" allows the drives to be seen but switching on and off hot-swappable mode seems inconstant and system feels unreliable.

Found a configuration that allowed installation to a 1TB seagate, and it booted, but had lots of backchat in the bootup.

Inserting an old PCI card with two sata ports appears to alleviate all this madness by not using the Mobo's SATA ports. The MOBO, otherwise, works fine from a liveusb (my first try with the new board). Only when I started adding drives it went haywire. Wondering if the on board SATA chip is still a little bit new?

Will look into updating BIOS firmware also...

Any thoughts?

[bicol_willem]

"Any thoughts?"

If I understand it correct, this is a new board?

I would try to swap it for one that works (Unless you try to install Winxxxx , yuck!, you might never know if it is defective in some way. It could very well be if Windows also fails to install). Get a "Linux friendly board", not hard to do those days.

Catagory: Shxx happens!

[menotu]

Don't know whether this is at all relevant to your issues

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/motherboards/1283698/asus-p8h61-m-le

The first wave of Sandy Bridge motherboards were afflicted by a flaw in the chipset – the SATA2 ports could degrade over time. This won’t affect most people (who will simply use the SATA3 ports) and new revisions of these boards are becoming available, but this is the first ‘fixed’ motherboard we’ve seen.

[AS]

Hello VI,

Long story short, it's a nice board with a Core i5 4gig ram. On board video. But it hates SATA drives.

The default setting in the BIOS for "SATA mode" is "IDE mode"

This wont allow either LXDE.2011.06 or the 64bit test3.iso to boot. It drops the boot device and craps out deep into the boot sequence.

So I can boot with a liveusb. But the ATA drives don't show up. And I can't burn a CD.

Changing  BIOS SATA mode to "AHCI mode" allows the drives to be seen but switching on and off hot-swappable mode seems inconstant and system feels unreliable.

of course, it should be set to AHCI... what do you mean by "switching on and off hot swappable mode"  ? is this a BIOS settings ?

Found a configuration that allowed installation to a 1TB seagate, and it booted, but had lots of backchat in the bootup.

the best thing you can do here is to provide some more info  , i.e. while running liveCD:

dmesg | grep ata
fdisk -l

Inserting an old PCI card with two sata ports appears to alleviate all this madness by not using the Mobo's SATA ports. The MOBO, otherwise, works fine from a liveusb (my first try with the new board). Only when I started adding drives it went haywire. Wondering if the on board SATA chip is still a little bit new?

Will look into updating BIOS firmware also...

Any thoughts?

if your MB is this one: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8H61M_LE
it appear to support some fancy BIOS settings UEFI, EZ mode, Advanced mode .... very probably you need to  tune up some BIOS parameter ....

AS

[Village Idiot]

AS

In the BIOS, if I select AHCI mode, each of the four SATA ports have a choice of enabling or disabling Hot Plug.

Sorry for the confusion.

the best thing you can do here is to provide some more info  Wink, i.e. while running liveCD:

dmesg | grep ata
fdisk -l

Will post that tho the 'ata' lines are not that outstanding. I need to read the whole dump..

if your MB is this one: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8H61M_LE
it appear to support some fancy BIOS settings UEFI, EZ mode, Advanced mode .... very probably you need to  tune up some BIOS parameter ....

Yes. That's the one. There is a basic view bios screen or an advanced view(where the SATA tweaks are). The basic view has a choice of three (basic) settings Optimal, Power saving & Performance. I was initially using Performance and I switched to Optimal and it seems to be a lot better.

I'll sleep on this and attack it tomorrow and find out what these basic settings are changing when my mind is more clearer.  

Thanks for all your help. (everyone).  

[Just17]

I would

select the safest BIOS default config available, then do .....

ensure AHCI is selected
turn off hot swappable completely
disable any SATA ports not in use, if the BIOS allows it.

[Village Idiot]

Done.

This morning I tried to rip a DVD to the local drive using the onboard SATA. The HDD was bogging down and forcing the DVD spindle to slow down. Throughput was around 3 megs a sec. Geez.

Plugged in a USB3 to sata with a brand new 2tb seagate and it copies perfectly the DVD at 15megs/sec. All drives can do easy 110mb/s in hdparm test no matter what the connection. Damn, this board is flakey.

 

It's behaving like the way when we used to have to turn on DMA on the drive. Works but sluggish.

Wonder if there is a boot cheat code I should be using..

[dvhenry]

We still don't know what controllers are being detected and what kernel modules are being loaded, so can you give us lspci -nnk.
Also are you running only SATA disks, or PATA as well?

[Village Idiot]

Update: (I can't believe it's over a month since I looked at this..  )

Today I got the latest LXDE CD and vowed to put this right or bust.

I was getting alot of irq conflict messages during boot. In the terminal this message barges in rudely: "Disabling IRQ #16".

So in dmesg, I found this: "Disabling IRQ #16 nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option". Ah! 

So I added "irqpoll" to my grub line now all is good with the world.

I have removed the sata add-on card and it looks like I can get on with configuring this one for it's intended owner. I promised him "ready before Christmas", however I didn't specify which Christmas... 

Thanks everyone. 

[djohnston]

Didn't see this thread until today. Where was I? 

I have the same problem on two new mobos that won't boot SATA drives unless SATA mode is set to AHCI. Unlike your board, mine have no IRQ conflicts. dmesg | irqpoll returns nothing.