ECS Mobo sees SATA drives as USB

hamhox · Joined: Oct 21, 2006 Posts: 92

I'm building a system for myself using an ECS C51GM-M board w/dual-core Athlon CPU. At first, the board would hang during boot with the W2K CD in an optical drive; then I flashed the BIOS and that made the board boot from the CD.There is an 80Gb SATA drive on the frist SATA port (IDE chan 3) and a 250GB on the second port.
I have installed W2K Pro SP4 and update rollup from MS.
Now the system boots and sees the SATA drives and shows them as removable USB devices.I don't know if this will be a problem, have to wait and see. Meanwhile, has anybody seen this? Comments appreciated.

goretsky · Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 12:25 am Post subject:

Hello,

I cannot say I have noticed this behavior before, but then again I do not normally use ECS brand motherboards.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

did you go in to the bios and set the sata controller to native ide for single hard drive systems.
raid for mutliple hd systems.

also check the sata controller slot on the motherboard. it matters which one you place the cord in the sata systems do not use jumpers on the hd to set master or slave. so you got to find the proper controller to plug the hd in to.

hamhox · Joined: Oct 21, 2006 Posts: 92

rovingcowboy:
Motherboards have no such thing as SATA controller 'slots'.
I have been using dual-HD setups for many years, and I've never
heard of requiring RAID access for multiple HDs. I strongly suspect that if I were to choose this option in CMOS it would
wipe out my existing data structure, which is:
10GB system partition on primary HD, large apps on first partition of second HD,
and large NTFS partition behind the latter for archives such as Downloads, ISO files, Ghost imagefiles for backup, MP3 music collections etc.

goretsky · Posted: Tue Apr 06, 2010 1:43 am Post subject:

Hello,

Some motherboards have multiple SATA controllers on them, and may prefer to boot first from one set in particular (e.g., the chipset-based one) using the additional SATA controllers for post-boot storage (single drives, JBOD or RAID configurations).

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

hamhox · Joined: Oct 21, 2006 Posts: 92

Had to ditch the ECS mobo, bought an MSI K9MMV, same thing;
SATA drives show up as USB.

alphanumeric · Joined: Jun 02, 2004 Posts: 651

Just so you know they are not showing up as USB, they are just showing up as "removable" drives. The SATA standard supports hot swapping the drives so you could unplug the SATA cable without powering down your PC. I wouldn't try it with the system drive though. As mentioned, changing the mode in the BIOS to IDE emulation would likely stop them from showing as removable. I've heard that certain drivers do it and some don't also. I don't have a SATA drive so I'm just going by what I have read on line.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2238 Location: Central FL, USA

Congratulations on getting rid of that ECS mobo. They are well knows by computer builders the world over as "trouble".

I feel certain that you will find the MSI a much better product. It's what I use exclusively for all my builds.
I call the MSI board "Feature Rich", but you do need to disable the features you don't want or use, in the CMOS Setup and do set your sata drives to IDE emulation. I can't remember the exact wordage.

SATA ports will be numbered on the motherboard and you should always plug your OS drive into the lowest numbered port. That will be either port zero or one.
Then other drives can be plugged into the higher numbered ports.
Just for safety, I never unplug anything in my system with the power on. I know that "HOT Swapping" is supposed to work OK, but I just don't trust it.

It's well worth all the little steps you may have to go through to get the SATA drive working properly, because they are so much faster than the old IDE drives.
My first SATA drive ran off of a PCI (SATA Controller) plug-in card for the first year, till I got up the funds for my first SATA compatible mobo. I was sure glad to have the extra speed.

Good luck with your new setup!
The Doctor Cool

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

got this gigabyte board on this computer its doing great and it is fast.

not sure what msi is? but i have an msi dvdcdrw drive in the other computer.

hay doc name off some of the known errors on the ecs boards? let me see if the one i got has any of them so i know it aint my programs.

Surprised

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2238 Location: Central FL, USA

Does the term "Junk" ring any bells? Rolling Eyes

ECS and PCChips are two brands that most respectable PC builders just won't touch. The list of problems is too long to even bother to print here.

With all the really great motherboards out there, buying junk just isn't necessary.
Good names include Asus, MSI
http://us.msi.com/index.php?func=prodpage1&maincat_no=1
Gigabyte, Biostar, Intel.
Before they got out of the PC business, IBM made a great motherboard.
The IBM Blue Lightning was an exceptional mobo. But, that's ancient history now.

Doc Cool

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

well it seems i only get notice of message replys here once a week? and only for one message that has been replyed too, instead of them all.

i've been over at geeks forum mostly this week but trying to get anyone to answer there in any group for things is hard, and even getting your answer in the forum postings is hard.

doc. this pcchips board might be okay if used with just a few programs.
and not online gaming. or office work, as it is doing fine with my off line stand alone jukebox. and it was the only one that would hold my old eide hd's sound on it is far better then the old soundblaster i had.
and this board is being run 24 7 playing music and switching playlists and doing maintance all by timers that windows is using through scheduled tasks. still as said i don't do anything great with it like playing rpg or online or much editing at all, it is strictly an off line jukebox.

so even though it is junk in everyone's mind that builds pc's for people, it does what i need., and i have no errors i can see that are caused by the mb.

i do have some caused by something? like it reboots and it keeps opening the my documents folder on the reboot.?
can't find what is causing that.
got some bad hotkeys i can't delete so maybe one of them is doing it?

which is why i wanted to know what the errors you knew are to see if they were causing those two items.

Smile