Samsung HD501LJ

[wonderlust]

I am having issues with a couple of these drives on an Asrock 939Dual-Sata2 Motherboard.

When connected to the Chipset Sata ports the bios never finds the drive on a cold boot. A quick reboot fixes the problem, (seems that the drive is taking too long to initialise.)

I have proved this theory by swapping the drive for a different make and model and the bios picks that up every time.

I can put a work-a-round in place by connecting the drive to the Jmicron Sata connector, as the little extra delay is enough to enable the drive to initialise correctly, but, in the past, I have found the Jmicron drivers (admittedly under XP) not to be very stable (PC is running Vista x86).

Anybody had similar issues with these drives?

[Lynx]

There is some setting over delay wait for hard drives, i believe setting a longer delay wait fixes this. I could have imagined but i do believe this solved problems for some people.

[wonderlust]

There is no setting for that in the bios of the board :(

Also checked out Samsungs Dos feature tool, nothing in there either :(

[Lynx]

Tried the sata chipset? Because some of them have a bios.

[wonderlust]

only setting it as raid, and even then it boots too quick for the drive to be recognised.

It was a reinstall due to a new hard drive and the Jmicron controller has worked flawlessly under Vista (perhaps in the years since this board was new the driver has gained some stabilty! :D

It is currently under going Prime95 testing (it was being unstable before) and so far seems to be working as expected:-

Full System specs:-
Enlight (antique) ATX desktop case (used to be beige is now yellow ish) no fans.
Asrock 939Dual-Sata2 Motherboard (Bios 2.1b slic modded)
AMD 3200+
2x1Gb DDR400 brand new bought from Etailer based in Jersey for >£34 the pair
Samsung HD501TJ
XFX 6200TC
SB Audigy 2VS
Liteon SOHW-1693S
Liteon LTR-32123S
Trust 570W PSU

[Cheule]

I am using the same board and drive as yourself, I was having a similar problem but with an old 120gb Maxtor drive. The board was either sitting there frozen after a reset, or I kept getting errors stating various windows files could not be found. Strangely, it was not only a cold-boot problem but it also occurred when the board got too hot.

Since installing the HD501J, the problems have gone away, at least for now.

Edit: Are you using the latest 2.30 bios?

[wonderlust]

no 2.31c slic modded

[chatters]

no 2.31c slic modded

Naughty wonder why you have that ;)

The problem with slic bios's they arent as good, i loose about 0.2 ghz of my overclock on the none standard bios.

[wonderlust]

This board didnt loose anything, Did the mod myself :D It's not hard.

Have you tried one of the ocwb performance modded bios?

The current owner is now happy and the system is rock solid stable.

[jonwoad]

dont lose anything on mine :D

And yes I do have a legit version lol

[Cheule]

Ok I have something new to add.

Over the last couple of nights, I've been getting the same problem on the same hardware. Now, I've found that because the SATA connectors on the board are 'old spec' and do not have the metal retaining clips, the cable keeps coming loose.

This causes random 'STOP' errors and upon reboot the drives are not detected. Hell, the machine won't even fully POST.