ASUS A7N8X SATA data corruption - Silicon Image 3112 - Serial ATA- BSOD

Hardware: ASUS A7N8X Motherboard (1004 Bios), Seagate 80GB SATA Hard
Drive, high quality ram, case, ps.

OS: Windows XP Pro (1.0.0.22 SiI3112A SATA drivers)

Problem: Hard drive data corruption (NTFS boot drive).

Symptoms: Windows XP Pro reboots during bootup sequence. Drive will
cause any computer that attempts to read from partition to crash.
Recovery Console BSOD with a STOP 0x00000024.

My Theory: Bad SATA drivers or bad SATA controller (SiI3112A).

Solution: Swap motherboard and SATA drive with IDE drive. The
motherboard (except for SATA drivers) might have been fine, but ASUS
does not provide enough information to determine this.

Notes: Corrupt (primary) partition was lost. Seagate's bootable utility
cd exits to a DOS prompt after loading SATA drivers, so you can delete
the bad partition using fdisk. Do not try to get partition information
of bad parition using fdisk (http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/). After
bad partition was deleted, drive was recognized and accessible as a
second disk.

NTFSDOS can be used to access an NTFS partition from DOS
(http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/NTFSDOS.shtml).

Conclusion: This is the first problem I have had with ASUS, and I might
buy another motherboard from them. I would never purchase another
product that includes hardware or software from Silicon Image.

 

Sorry, I cannot help with your problem but I wanted to thank you for the
NTFSDOS link, I am going to find it incredibly useful. For what is it worth
Tom's Hardware benchmarked the SiI3112A as the fastest SATA controller out
there, of course that is no comment on their mass production QA process...Do
you know for sure it is not a bum drive?

Good Luck,

Koop

--
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=905761
XP 2500+ @ 11.5*200
A7N8X DLX 2.0
2x256MB Corsair PC3200LL @ 2-2-2-6
ATI Radeon Pro 9800
WD Raptor 10K RPM SATA - WD 800JB SE
Eheim 1250 w/ 1/2"ID Clearflex
MCW5000+MCW50+'86 Chevette Core
CPU 27C Idle 34C Full Load w/ on-die sensor

 

Upgrade to the latest BIOS and Sil driver (1.0.0.281) and the problem has
disappeared. I had this issue with Maxtor drives with SATA/IDE adapters,
switched to Seagate 120 SATA drives, upgraded the BIOS/Driver and all works
fine now running RAID.

Dave Melvin

 

I should add: do not use the 100281 drivers, they give very poor write
speeds.

 

Do *NOT* install the .281 driver. It cripples your write speed, and you need
to MANUALLY remove it, in order to change to a different version.

It was released as a temporary fix for the corruption-issue, but there's now
no need for it - the corruption issue is sorted with the latest BIOS.

http://web.newsguy.com/nomnet/silicon_v10029.zip is the driver you should be
using.

 

Seconded.

 

For what it's worth, Silicon Image claims that the problem is with the
ASUS BIOS. I should not have been able to purchase a new motherboard
with a known bug this severe. Maybe it is time to switch to a Mac...I
just want my f**king hardware to work!

 

Other than the corrupted partition, why is it necessary to reformat all
drives?

 

Because you need to remove the corruption that's already present.
If you want to miss out this step, then go ahead. But it's likely you'll run
into problems later.

 

It is, and the latest BIOS fixes it.

Er, the bug is fixed.

 

The corruption didn't crash the system until two weeks ago. The latest
BIOS wasn't available when I purchased the motherboard almost a month ago.

 

I replaced the drive, so I should have that covered. I was just
wondering if you knew any specifics about the corruption.

 

Same situation here.
But now the problem is fixed, so don't worry about it

 

I wish I could. I think I suffer from POST traumatic stress disorder.
Hardy har har