DVD Roms and Gigabyte

[TNTTNT]

Hi all,

I have a newish build. It was a few months ago, but I have been out of the country for a bit, so the machine has hardly been used. I am looking to start the next project of building an xp based machine for my five year old twins, but am getting a bit bogged down closing off the last machine build.

It is based on a i7 920 and Gigabyte UD5 mobo. I have two mirror raid drives on the Intel sockets. I connected my two DVD writers to the GSATA ports, so free up the intel based slots for other hard drives.

About 80% of the time the machine picks up the DVD roms in the bios with no probs - a Sony and LG. The rest of the time it hangs a bit longer, and only picks up the Sony. This is my second UD5 Mobo, and I think the first one may have done something similar.

Has anyone noticed this, or knows what the solution might be? It is really wierd that it only happens 20% of the time.

 

[TNTTNT]

As an update. I also still had some on-going resume from sleep issues, so I thought screw it, and do a Vista reinstall.

I did the drive format and Vista re-install, and when I was reloading Mobo drivers the bios failed to start and said checksum error. It seem to self heal, but is this an indication of a serious underlying problem, and is there any action I should take?

It may be linked to the DVD drives not always being detected by GSATA2 ports.

 

[TNTTNT]

Solution

Unfortunately the community could not assist on this occassion, but think I have found solution and am posting so if someone has a similar issue, it may appear in a search.

After doing lots of research into sleep related issues, I narrowed it down. It occurred to me that there seem a fairly high failure rate on DVD writers. It occurred to me that the fault may be hardware related. I disconnected each drive and connected only one. I only seemed to have problems when the LG drive was connected the GSATA port, and no issues with the Sony.

I think if someone had a similar problem I would suggest: -

- Update Bios
- Update all drivers
- Make sure all Microsoft updates and Service Packs are loaded
- Remove connected peripherals one by one, checking each time for problem reoccurrence
- Swap BIOS options bewteen IDE and AHCI if DVDs are on GSATA ports (I don't think you can change if main hard drives are attached as well, and windows is loaded)
- swap SATA cables to check these and connections
- Swap over DVD drives

Concurrently you could check dump files in Vista report centre and event viewer.

This was a nasty issue to find a solution for.

 

[TNTTNT]

Update

Sorry not to kill this thread, but this should be the last post. I didn't want to leave the matter resolved with the wrong solution.

I got a new DVD writer to replace the LG one and the problem still existed. I was a bit down, when I realised the JMicron GSATA ports on the UD5 is a single pair of SATA ports which is split into two pairs some how. The problem must be due to the way the GSATA controller handles two DVD drives. I moved the both DVDs to one single pair of GSATA ports, not on different pairs.

The result is only one DVD is picked up in post, but both drives appear in Windows. This almost seemed to confirm the GSATA controller works in a weird way.

I'm convinced that there must be other UD5 Mobo owners who would have problems with 2 DVD drives, if they have them on the wrong combination of GSATA ports.

 

[Homeless]

Do you have the jmicron drivers installed by any chance? If so uninstall them. Also, why aren't you using the intel ports? They are much faster and more reliable

 

[TNTTNT]

Thanks for the tip. I thought about using the Jmicron Driver as a possible fix, but thought it safer to update with the latest version from Gigabyte. They may well be the same, but used just in case they weren't.

I have Vista loaded in Raid 1 mirror array, using the Intel ports. I wanted to put the DVD drives on GSATA ports so I could add more raid arrays to the Intel ports as hard drives get bigger and cheaper.

Also, I really think the Jmicron ports are really useless, so that's another reason why I wanted to keep hard drives on the intel ports.

I had two Gigabyte UD5's and they both showed this problem. I am amazed that I haven't found a fellow sufferer on Google. This was more incentive to try to get the best fix I could in this post.

It's a good job I am doing another build soon because I have a spare DVD drive now.