K8N Neo4 Platinum - Sata Issue

My problem has a long story behind it, so if you want to read the full story look here http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1254531
Long story short, my psu died and when I got the new one back it killed my raid 0 array. I bought a brand new Western Digital 250 gb sata drive, plug it in and when I try to install Windows it doesn't detect it. Tried different sata drivers, updating bios, enabling / disabling raid in bios, different ports, different cables. Popped the HDD is another computer and it didn't pick it up. I am thinking my X-connect 500 watt psu is frying hard drives, but I am not quite sure. I bought an Antec psu tester which only tested the main 24 pin connector and it checked out fine.

Never been able to see individual sata drives in the bios. Before this problem started I was running a raid 0 array which I was able to set as my first boot priority in the bios.
I have tried many different combinations with the sata drivers. I have pressed f6 during the Windows install and used the NV raid sata drivers from the driver disk that came with the motherboard. Even though I am not running raid I tried it anyway. I know these drivers worked since I used them when I setup my raid 0 array when I first bought the system. Of course it didn't work so I tried downloading the latest sata raid drivers from the msi site, loaded them on a floppy and used them during the Windows install which did not work. Tried the same with the Silicon raid controller both the disk that came with the motherboard and the updated ones from the site. Nothing works. Tried without loading any sata raid drivers and same thing...no disk detected.
I am pretty convinced this Ultra psu is screwing up my hard drives. I bought an Antec psu tester today, although it only checks my 24 pin connection and it checked out fine. I might return this Antec psu tester and buy a better one that allows me to test the molex and sata power connections.
Thinking about buying this ocz psu http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139001

Similar Messages

MSI K8N NEO4-F SATA ISSUE

System Specs:
MSI K8N NEO4-F
x2 512mb Corsair Xtra Low Latency 2-2-2-5
VisionTek x850XT
Creative Audigy 2 Platinum w/ Live Drive
(1) WD Raptor 10k rpm 74gb (SATA)
(1) Maxtor 300gb (SATA)
(1) Maxtor 200gb (IDE)
(1) Samsung 52x32x52 Burner
Windows XP Pro
Recently built system but I'm having SATA performance trouble. Let's start from the boot process. Sometimes when booting, the system will hang while detecting drives, and not detect my 300GB sata drive. A simple reset will sometimes fix this. If allowed to continue to boot, a blue windows XP error screen briefly flashes and the system reboots itself. Going into the bios and trying to autodetect the drive causes a long hang and no detection.
Moving into windows if everything seems to detect alright, sometimes the 300GB drive seems to function perfectly well, and for as long as my system stays up. Other times I'll go to open some sort of media on the drive (like video), and it will run rediculously slow, skipping and barely running.
I tried replacing the SATA cables, thinking that maybe they were bent too much or perhaps just bad, but after replacing them the problem seems to persist. This problem at first seemed confined to the 300GB, but my last boot to windows was crawling and anything i opened didnt respond, as the OS is housed on the raptor. So now it seems both drives are capable of this problem.
Does anyone have any incite?

Hi mjc2264,
It's the series 10 300gb maxtors that have been giving pps some issues not just with msi but all AMD64 Nvidia chipsets, its unusual to have Maxtor9 ?? give problems.
A number of things you might try:-
1) Bios Standard Cmos Features try changing the Access Mode for your 300Gb to Large instead of Auto.
2) Detection is sometimes Worse due to the Pata channel issues. If using the Nvidia IDE Drivers ensure your
Maxtor 200gb (IDE)
Samsung 52x32x52 Burner
are Jumpered explicitly as Master/Slave the NV drivers don't like CS (cable select). Ideally have 200gb on IDE1 & Samsung on ide 2.
3) If 2) gives no change Or if you feel the need Roll back The IDE drivers & try the MS Default ones
Click update driver on the Nvidia Pata driver tab in properties.
Choose install from a specific location
Select dont choose , i will choose the driver
Then select standard dual channel pci controller which is the XP 1
4) If Windows detects problems with drive access r/w errors it downgrades the drive access mode. If you have been having issues check in device manager IDE Ata/Atapi Controllers Right click properties on each tab & check access mode it s/be Serial ATA DMA for SATA & I think Ultra DMA 5 (or 6??) for Pata HD. If you find any down graded Set them back & XP will ask to reboot.
Luck

K8N Neo4 Platinum (7030) issues with new CPU

I was running a 3000(754). It was running just fine, I decided to swap in a 3700. I can't get to post or anything. Everything comes on(fans, lights ect...). I can put back in my 3000 and it works fine. I have updated the bios. Is this CPU supported? Or is it a dead cpu? Thanks for the help.

Quote from: coreystang on 03-July-07, 00:55:53
Sorry for the lack of info, I have updated my sig. Please let me know if any other info is needed. Does moving the jumpers clear the Bios or the CMOS? I have done that. I will take the battery out tonight and see if that works.
don't forgot to remove power cord from the PSU before Clear CMOS.
provide full details about your newest CPU which you are tying to install.
check for bent CPU pins too.
what shows your D-Bracket?

XP64bit installation halts, K8N Neo4 Platinum - No SATA drives found?

My setup:
Athlon 64 3500+
K8N Neo4 Platinum
2GB OCZ 3200 Premier
2) WD Sata 80GB HD's (for RAID 0)
Nvidia 6800GT Extreme VGA
I was recently lucky enough to get my hands on a real Windows XP Pro64bit Extended Edition. I gathered quite a few 64bit drivers which claim to do the job (so they say.)
However I ran into a very strange issue during installation.
My main concern was getting RAID drivers to utilize after pressing F6 during the Windows install. Unfortunately I could not find Nvidia drivers so I went with the Silicon Image Sil3114 64bit drivers I got from their website. Copied them to a disk and thought I was ready to rock N roll. I have updated all BIOS to latest versions as of the date of this post.
Now I went into the RAID BIOS and setup my RAID 0 Array and both SATA drives are shown. All went well in this dept.
I began my installtion of XP64 and pressed F6 to install the RAID drivers. Popped the floppy in and the driver files were copied successfully.
I continued on to the point where you are prompted to setup Windows XP and it searches for any previous installs.
I continue to where I should get the dislmaimer and to press F8, however the install halts and say no hard drives were found. Setup cannot continue.
Any ideas as to why my drives are not being detected during installation? They show up fine under the RAID setup BIOS.
Any info or thoughts is truly appreciated.

You need to make your own floppy for the nvidia 64 ide drivers.
How to install Windows on SATA using F6 to load Drivers
Follow item 1 Obviously usinfg the Neo4 64bit unified driver pack Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
luck

SATA drives not being detected - K8N Neo4 Platinum

I have the same problem, different PSU!
msi k8n neo4 platinum pcb 1.0
3000 64 939
corsair 1gb dual channel ddr400
nvidia 8800gts
antec truepower 550 (19a @ 12v)
used to run 2 ide maxtor 120 and 80
added in a sata dvd writer, worked for 6 months
added in a sata 1TB seagate 7200, sata fails a majority of the time
same symptons now persist as in original post.
:< either bios detects both sata drives, neither, or it crashes. this happens respectively rarely, uncommon, and most common
what ive tried:
updated all mainboard, bios, video drivers to the most up to date (i had to in order for bios to detect the full size of the 1TB)
no ide, same problems
only 1 sata, with and without ide, same problems
the sata only works after a long period of time (or randomly), that i dont use it
(ive had both sata unplugged for 12 hours, booted up this morning with them and it detected, i selected safe mode boot, after making it through a majority of the load, it crashed)
testing a new psu in a day or so, much more powerful. ill give you all my results.

The cables aren't overly bent?
"...worked for 6 months"
"...fails a majority of the time"
Not very relevant, but since i found the FAQs, and there are no less than four FAQs for hard disks http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=prodfaq&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=165#menu :
"Silicon Image Si3114R Raid bios doesn't have JBOD setting in it, why?
In the new Silicon Image BIOS, JBOD already been renamed as "Concatenation".
If you want to use single SATA HDD or when tou want use each SATA HDD as IDE mode, you can choose "Concatenation" function in Silicon RAID BIOS."
"I am using a SATA hard drive with NCQ technology on this motherboard and I am experiencing problems. How do I fix it?
The issue depends on the Southbridge chipset. Nvidia is currently working on an updated nForce driver to address the issues with certain hard drives.
You could contact Nvidia support to ask for the new driver if there is one. If there is not any new driver to solve the issue, please disable NCQ on your system." /My fattening. /

Largest SATA drive for K8N Neo4 Platinum

I have a system based on the K8N Neo4 Platinum board, I'm planning to up, the storage capacity of my rig and was wondering if I can install a 500 GB or larger SATA or SATA II drive on it?
to make long story short I would like to know whats the largest Hard Drive (either IDE or SATA) one can install on a system with this board without problems or compatibility issues.
I presently have a Maxtor Diamond Plus 80GB SATA drive,
Any takers??? ???

I see no problems, just try it.
As for a Sata-II drive, don't take Maxtor, any other drive should be fine.
However, you maybe must jumper it to SATA-1, depends on the onboard controller.

K8N Neo4 Platinum, how to move MBR to sata (make it drive #1)?

I am not sure I am phrasing the question correctly, so bear with me. I have a K8N Neo4 platinum with the SiI3114 controller and sata ports 4-8 (I believe its what they are calling PCB 1.x) with bios v1.D. I moved the board to another box and installed winXP on it. I was running it with IDE hard drives. Everything was working great but the OS was running really slow so I bought a SATA 300 mb/s drive and pluged it into SATA1 (I read about using ports 3 and 4 for raid but I do not want to use the NVraid at all, it is disabled). Then I proceeded to reinstall win XP. In the setup, I deleted the original C partiton and created one on the sata drive and rebooted so that there would be no "C" drive confusion by the winxp setup (have had that problem before and this keeps it from happening). Went through the setup and the sata was correctly reported as "C". Told windows to install itself there but it told me that it needed to write to MBR on the old c drive but that, since I had deleted the partiton, it couldn't and had to format it. So I knew that something was wrong.
So I rebooted and disabled the ide bus that contained the old IDE drive and just left the CD ide bus enabled. WinXP installed fine with no complaints. Then it rebooted and I re-enabled the ide bus in the bios. It wouldn't boot into the partiton I just installed winxp on! To get it to boot, I had to use F11 (the bios boot menu) and select the sata drive. Went through the whole setup winXP thing and rebooted. Same problem, it wouldn't boot the sata drive. :(
As long as that ide bus with the old ide drive is enabled, it won't boot the sata drive! I have rearranged the boot order on the bios every way possible. I opened up the box and moved that ide chain with the old ide drive to the ide2 port and put the dvd drive on ide1. I made the old drive slave and the prior slave master. That didn't fix it either. How do I tell this motherboard that the 1st drive is the sata drive? How do I tell it the MBR should be there not on the old ide drive? How do I fix this? Thanks!

Thank you for your replies! Hans, thank you I will give it a go again doing full formats all the way. I usually use the full format when installing winXP but I did things in a different order than you instructed so I will definately try it.
Aicjofs, thank you, There are 3 hard drives in this system currently. There is the ide hard drive that used to be the "c" drive (a western digital 160gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache) and a second ide hard drive that is an extended partition with 1 logical drive with data on it (western digital 300gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache). Then there is a sata hard drive in sata1 port with 2 partitions one primary and one extended. The extended partion does have data on it as I moved stuff there after I got winXP up the 2nd time (western digital 250gb sata II 7200rpm 16mg cache). Right now, I have the ide drive with data on it as ide2 master and the old "c" drive as ide2 slave and it is unformatted and contains no partion information (I deleted the partition after I installed the SATA drive and installed winXP). XP won't boot. What happens is that, if I take the winxp cd out, it gives me a "no system" error. If I leave the WinXP cd in it boots that disk. However, if I use "f11" and choose to boot the sata drive, winxp comes up just fine. If I disable the ide bus with the two ide hard drives, it boots winxp just fine.
Edit: bios is v1.D. It feels like this mobo is telling windows setup that the master ide drive is the first disk and to ignore everything else. It feels like if I can just tell the mobo that the sata drive is the first disk then everything will work . It is late night where I am now, and I've been fighting with this since the afternoon so I might have to goto sleep but I will be back at it tomorrow and will go though what Hans instructed. If anyone has any otehr ideas, I'd really appreciate that as well.

Strange power-on (issue?) with K8N Neo4 Platinum

Hi all, i have a new K8N Neo4 Platinum, non-sli.
My rig:
A643000+ winch, no overclock
2x512MB Corsair XMS DDR400MHz
2x200GB Seagate mirroring
Plextor PX-708A
BenQ DVD Burner
AN OLD Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI (new pci-e gfx card later...)
A powerfull enermax coolergiant 600W ATX 2.0 power supply
Latest official nforce4 drivers and bios
It seems to be ok: installed winXP pro sp2 and updates, installed two Seagate in raid-mirroring with the nforce4 controller, installed some progs and utils, firewall is ok, prime95 go without problems for 1 our (more tests later), cpu temp is 34°C and sys temp is 30°C.
CoreCenter Say:
Vcore -> 1.41V
3.3V -> 3.39V
+5V -> 5.13V
+12V -> 12.26V
memory volt -> 2.60V
FSB -> 200MHz
PCI-E -> 100MHz
cpu volt -> By-VID
Apparently no weird things...
When i switch-on the Pc, for some seconds( ̃10 secs) it don't want to boot, optical drives blink repeatly and the screen is blank, like a bad overclock... But the machine isn't overclocked, and the bios is ok, i think. After 10 secs, finally it go and run flawlessly, post and other things are ok. When i reboot in win, the 10secs-issue repeat itself. So this strange thing at the post is normal? Anyone with the same "problem"? For now the rig is ok when it logon in winXP...

Hi all my friends
@JER101 >>> Ehrr i mean post, sorry
I had unplugged the optical drives, but the problem persist. When plugged, they blink for some times and after blinking the machine go into post-phase and after it boot in the correct manner. I think the PCI card is the problem, like some of you said... I will buy one pci-e card (obviously), but i hope things are not dangerous for now
In the mean time, i have a new problem: emule+firewall=BSOD. I know, there are tons of post about this issue around, but the solution is unclear... Tried to disable DEP, patched WinXP SP2 with latest things from winupdate, but nothing work for me, emule and the firewall generate a crash&reboot. Tried with the Marvell LAN, too, without success.
Any suggestions? Usefull links? If i uninstall the "NVIDIA Forceware Network Access Manager" it will work without problem with a thirdy part firewall, like sysgate?
P.S.
What's the problem with nvidia drivers? C'mon nvidia, solve this damned issue!

Lan issues with the K8N NEO4 Platinum NF4U 939 Motherboard

New K8N NEO4 Platinum NF4U 939 Motherboard.
After three or four hours the connection started to get unstable. I am a high end gamer and any net slowdown I see and feel.
Using my "Ping Plotter" program i saw the issue. The first hop to my router was going from 0 to 47ms. On all of the other conputers on this network hop one stays at 0.
In looking at the over all ping to my game server I noted that when hop 0 went to 47 it messed up all of the other hops and made the connection to my game server unstable.
The odd thing is I bypassed the onboard nic's and installed a PCI nic and it did the same thing.
I got with MSI and they had ne updare the NVIDA drivers. This lowered the swing to 0-17. I removed the PCI lan and am now back with the onboard nic. I have replaced the DSL modem, cable and removed the dlink and the issue is still the same.
This is my first computer with XP and at this point I do not know if this is an XP issue or a driver issue.
In installing a pci nic some of the network control is still done on the motherboard so that does not rule out a motherboard/chipset driver issue.
I have set up a web site that shows screen shots of the ping plotter. Please take the time to look at them and tell me what you think.
http://webviper.com/LanIssues.htm
Thanks for your help.
Regards,
WebViper

Hello !!
Please give more information about your system specs.
But i would try the following:
Download the latest nforce and vga drivers from nvidia ( if you are using nv VGA card ? ). Google for "driver cleaner" and download it.
Restart system and press F8 to enter safe mode. Now uninstall all nvidia drivers(chipset & VGA), and run Driver Cleaner after it. Select the nvidia tabs and remove them....
Now reboot, when prompted to install new drivers cancel this process. And start nvidia chipset driver setup, install all drivers but do not install the IDE driver from nvidia, you will be prompted for this.In first attempt you should not install nvidia firewall. Restart and install VGA drivers. Now test again your network connection. I hope it helps....
Greetz

LAN issues with the MS-7125 (K8N Neo4 Platinum)

UPDARED BIOS:
MS-7125 (K8N Neo4 Platinum, K8N Neo4-F, K8N Neo4-FI)
One place it said: Online Ver. 3.77.000 One place it said: Online Ver. 1.D0
The system now displaces a new Bios boot screen and the boot up number is now 5.2.16.
XP all up to date and LAN drivers up to date.
I am seeing a saw tooth ping to my WestTel DSL modem. On all of the other PCs here on my LAN the first hop is always 0ms. After updating the mother board bios and turning on the LAN memory I still get 0ms to 7 or 10 ms.
You can see more detals at http://webviper.com/LanIssues.htm
Any Ideas please email me at [email protected]

Sorry the system did not email me.....
I did update the BIOS and I used the liveupdate. I also updated the NVIDA drivers with a link that MSI sent me. This did help things out a lot but the issue is still there. I have updated the web page with more info and pics. I have disabled the Xp firewall and have hooked the pc up to the westtell dsl modem.
After a reboot things run fine for about three hours... Then it starts and get worse as time goes on. It is not a heat issue as my new case has 10 fans and the read out of the CPU is good! 34C
Thanks for the help.... Here is some more data... Do look at http://webviper.com/LanIssues.htm
Regards,
WebViper [email protected]
UPDARED BIOS:
MS-7125 (K8N Neo4 Platinum, K8N Neo4-F, K8N Neo4-FI)
One place it said: Online Ver. 3.77.000 One place it said: Online Ver. 1.D0
The system now displaces a new Bios boot screen and the boot up number is now 5.2.16.
MSI support sent me a link for updated NVIDA drivers and that helped the issue some. I do not have the link to the drivers as my link to the MSI support is not working now. Not sure if they have deleted it or if their system is down.
Lan Cards and drivers:
NVIDA nForce Networking Controller
Driver:4.8.2.0 Date:4/6/2005
Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet
Driver: 8.14.1.3 Date: 9/19/2005
I feel that this is a Driver/XP issue. When i loaded the new NVIDA drivers that MSI sent the first hop went from 0-47 to 0-17.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_winxp32_amd_6.70.html
If only i could get the driver to make it 0 all the time like the other 4 computers that are on the same router.

HELP! Installation of SATA HD on K8N NEO4 PLATINUM

I finally put together my system
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ venice
MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum
1 GB DDR400 RAM
Etc....
now my problem has to do with the SATA hard drive i bought for it, a maxtor diamondmax10 6L080MO, my system will boot and say "invalid drive" and will tell me to go into the RAID Tool.
I really dont know much about sata interface setup so i would appreciate a step by step walkthru on it, right know im forced to use my old reliable maxtor 20gb,
is it possible to have both the 20gb ata hd and the new 80gb sata drives? how do i install my sata drive?
i was planning on using the small one for software installation and the big sata one for storage
everything on my system is running well so far, except for the SATA drive problem,
PLEASE HELP!

Ceckardt,
You should not need to install any special drives with single SATA that not in a RIAD Array, if you have Windows XP SP2 installed, if you do not have SP2 installed, upgraded to it before doing anything I instruct you to do below.
If you using just SATA hard drive, all you should have to do is plug it in to one of the nVidia SATA connectors on the motherboard and if you have Windows up and running on the old 20GB Maxtor. Start windows and open the Disk Management Window. You get there by right clicking My Computer, menu will pop-up and left click “Manage” a Window will open and on the list on the left side of the call Computer Management, left click “Disk Management”. On the right of the Window you should see all of you drive of you system including you new 80GB SATA drive. You will have to Partition and format it, then it will show in My Computer as logical drive, the drive letter you will have assigned in the Disk Management.
If you need instructions, other the Windows Help to partition and format your drive under the disk manager, just reply or if the drive is list in the disk manage window and you cannot figure out how to partition and format the just start a new post asking for help using the Disk Manager.
If the drive is not listed in the Disk management Window, reply in the post for more help.
Good luck,
Roger

K8N Neo4 Platinum Dual/Single Channel issue

Hey guys,
Ive searched trough these forums, but i cant find the answer.
I have a K8N Neo4 Platinum with a Corsair XL (TWINX1024-3200XL)1Gb Kit, and i just cant find how to run it Dual Channel, every time i boot it says Single Channel @ 201 MHZ..
I am running a Athlon64 3700+ San Diego CPU
Please help..
Kind regards,
Patrick

thanx dudes, a big for the help!

K8N Neo4 Platinum random lock-ups and BSOD

I built a new PC about 3 months ago and from day 1 it has always locked up / frozen at random intervals. Sometimes it also BSOD's with a Machine Check Exception. Seems to lock up / freeze more often when have multifple windows open eg. Multiple IE running but really is random. I have replaced the Mobo and Ram but keep having the same issues. Have tried a clean install but no luck either. Did a clean install on an old IDE HDD and seemed fine but it did not have all of the software that I run on the SATA drive. Thinking the SATA drive may be the issue? Please Help!!!
System is as follows:
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum [Bios 1.D]
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ DC [AMD Drivers]
2 x Kingston 1024Mb ram [Dual Channel]
Nvidia 6800 Ultra [Latest Drivers 91.31]
Thermaltake Purepower 460W PSU +3.3V 30A, +5V 30A +12V 15A
Western Digital 200G SATA II HDD [SATA Port 5 i think]
1 x LG DVD +-R/RW [IDE Master] IDE port closest to edge of Mobo
1 x LG CDR/RW [IDE Slave]
MS XP Home SP2

Quote from: davePC on 09-August-06, 09:06:44
Did a clean install on an old IDE HDD and seemed fine but it did not have all of the software that I run on the SATA drive. Thinking the SATA drive may be the issue? Please Help!!!
Seemed fine?
There isn't really be any difference between an IDE drive and a sata.
Except that the sata drive needs some drivers as your installing the os.
Check your ram timings in bios but likely it's your psu.
Which components are on which rail?
The ones that use the +12v are your cpu,cdrom,dvdrom and graphics card.
Try disconnecting both roms and see if it improves things?

Constant HDD access (K8N Neo4 Platinum)

Hello all, this is my first time posting on these forums.
A couple of days ago I put together a new system for myself, with the following components:
* Athlon64 3200+ processor
* MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard
* 1Gb RAM
* Gigabyte 128Mb GeForce 6600GT graphics card
* 2x Seagate 250Gb 7200rpm SATA drives
* LG IDE dual-layer DVD-RW drive
* Apacer 7-in-1 internal USB 2.0 card reader
* Thermaltake "soprano" ATX midi-tower w/ 400W PSU
The two hard drives I have connected to ports SATA5 and SATA6 on the motherboard and set up in a RAID1 configuration (using the on-board Silicon Image SiI 3114 RAID controller). I then installed Windows XP Professional, which went on fine. The only problem I have now is that the hard drives are being constantly accessed by the system, even when I'm doing nothing on the system. This isn't just an occasional access once every second or so, the little HDD LED just flickers away merrily the whole time. I have run both filemon and diskmon on the system, and found that while no particular files appear to be being accessed, there is almost constant write activity being performed to the hard drives.
I have narrowed it down to somehow involving the Windows XP RAID drivers. If I boot from the Windows XP install disk and load the third party drivers for the SiI 3114, I get the constant disk access when sitting at the first screen of the install process ("Welcome to Windows XP" text-only screen). If I do the same without loading the drivers (thus Windows does not recognise the RAID drive), no disk access. I have tried updating the RAID controller drivers under the Device Manager (now up to version 1.2.0.0), but it does not fix the problem. I have done a full virus and spyware scan (bearing in mind that this is a clean install), with no results. I have checked all running processes and services (including making sure Indexing Service is not running), but have been unable to find anything that could be causing this constant activity. I have yet to try actually breaking the mirror and running the drives off the normal SATA controller. I will be trying that tonight when I get home if no other solution presents itself, but obviously I would rather get it behaving properly in RAID1 if at all possible.
It's driving me crazy. There doesn't appear to be any actual issues with the performance of the machine, but the constant hard disk activity can't be good for the drives long-term. I have searched these forums for a possible solution, and while some people have had similar problems, none of the suggested solutions have worked for me so far. If anyone can help me with my dilemma, I would be Eternally Grateful(tm).

Yes! At least I'm not alone... constant disk ticking is driving me nuts too.
I have same issue with a newly built system - different board but Sil3114.
My C: is on the NF4 SATA interface, but I have 4 250GB Seagaets on the Sil3114, intended for a RAID5 array. Having installed XP, I've become distracted by the constant disk access and have been trying everything to eliminate it before proceeding with the rest of the build - nogo. Your post gave me the clue - boot with Sil3114 disabled = no disk activity; boot with enabled = constant disk flogging.
I've got the Sil driver up to 1.2.3.1 but no better. Suspect it may be the Sil3114 BIOS that needs upgrading but seems no way to flash it - have you got anywhere with your debugging?
Appreciate a solution before I go crazy with the tick, tick tick....

IDE cables bundled with K8N Neo4 Platinum--80 wire or 40 wire?

Is the rounded IDE cable that comes with the K8N Neo4 Platinum (non-SLI) mobo an 80 wire or 40 wire cable? How can one tell?
I think I may be having some UDMA issues with my second hard drive (120GB Barracuda 7200.7 IDE). I installed XP on my SATA drive with no other drives connected and then added this IDE drive.
The rest of my setup is in my sig.
Thanks!
Bruce

OK. I checked my device manager for the info on my IDE drive. I looked at the properties of NVIDIA nForce4 Parallel ATA Controller.
Primary Channel:
HD Model # is ST3120026A. The drive set up as Ultra DMA 5 - Ultra 100. Checked boxes are "Let BIOS select transfer mode, Enable read caching, and Enable write caching. I did a speed test from Windows and it shows Theoretical limit of 100, Burst speed of 86.3 and Sustained speed of 58.1.
Secondary Channel:
DVD: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A. Transfer mode is Ultra DMA2 - Ultra 33. This is using a flat ribbon cable from an older computer. The only box checked is "Let BIOS select transfer mode".
Do these both look OK or do I need to change something?
Then I looked at the properties of NVIDIA nForce4 ADMA Controller and found:
My SATA drive (my boot drive) is HD model # ST3160812AS. Transfer mode is PIO Mode. Boxes checked are "Enable read caching, Enable write caching, and Enable command queuing. There is a yellow triangle that says "Transfer mode downgraded". I can't do a speed test.
What do I need to do to operate in Serial ATA Generation 2 - 3G? This is how this drive is supposed to operate.
Thanks!
Bruce

K8N Neo4 Platinum - Sata Issue

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