Since posting about my (bad) experiences with Maxtor SATA-II drives on an Asus A8R-MVP, I have received comments from a few people that were experiencing the same problem. I am glad that my post helped and recently had another experience which I would like to share.
A neighbour and good friend of mine had been in the dark ages as far as home computing goes. Household computing power consisted of a calculator, a cell phone and I think I saw an abacus in his family room, but I digress. 😉 With a budget of C$2,000, I set out to build a Media Center PC for him. The PC would run Windows XP, use his existing ~32″ television and allow him to digitally record television (2 different channels simultaneously), listen to the radio, consolidate his music library, surf the Internet, burn DVDs and store all the family pictures from his digital camera. The following system was ordered:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (socket 939)
- MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard (onboard SATA-II raid, optical audio, Firewire…)
- 1GB of PC3200 DDR memory (OCZ Dual Gold)
- 2x 300GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives (16MB cache, 7200rpm, SATA-II, mirrored)
- Antec Overture II Desktop Case w. 450W power supply (a very quiet case)
- Mitsumi 1.44MB floppy and 7-in-1 USB2 card reader
- Sapphire Radeon X700 PCI-Express w. 256MB of memory and S-video out
- Hauppage WinTV PVR-500MCE – dual TV tuner
- HP 740VI Lightscribe dual layer DVD/CD reader/writer
- Microsoft Remote Keyboard (wireless media keyboard)
- Microsoft Remote Control for Media Center
- Logitech Z-5500 speakers (500W, 5.1, optical input, THX certified)
A local vendor was able to provide all the parts, minus the speakers and the Hauppage TV tuner. With all parts acquired, I set out to install the tuner and configure the system. After installing the WinTV card, I booted the system but nothing happened. The PC would not even POST or display anything on the screen. I proceeded to try every other PCI slot on the motherboard and experimented with manual IRQ settings. The PC would not boot with the WinTV card installed.
Some surfing revealed another person that had the same problem. The trick was to disable the onboard SI3114 RAID controller in the BIOS. This particular MSI motherboard has *two* onboard RAID controllers – the SI3114 and a nForce which was used to mirror the 300GB drives. It turns out that the WinTV PVR-500MCE uses two IRQs (probably because it has two tuners), and this conflicted in some way with the SI3114 controller.
A 10 second fix to a frustrating problem that was not documented on Hauppauge’s or MSI’s website.
../mk