A7N8X-E Deluxe and 1TB SATA Disks
by Felix Kaechele on Aug.11, 2009, under Fedora Planet
I recently added my Samsung 1TB SATA disk to my home server which has an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mainboard. The BIOS is rather 2004ish and I wasn’t actually suprised when my 1TB disk didn’t work on the old SATA150 Controller (namely a Silicon Image SiI3112). However the BIOS on the SATA Controller was also 2004ish and I already knew that Silicon Image publishes BIOS updates on their webpages. So I went ahead and downloaded a new BIOS. As I already killed my eSATA PCMCIA Card while updating it’s BIOS I decided to do it right this time 
I found out that the BIOS needs to be embedded in the mainboard’s BIOS. So I downloaded CBROM and slipstreamed the new 2007ish SATA BIOS into it.
Here is what I came up with: C18E1013.BIN
Works like a charm for me, however I will not be responsible if this BIOS update kills your grandmother and eats your babies. USE AT YOUR OWN FUNRISK!
September 3rd, 2009 on 12:09 pm
Thanks man, works like a charm. The A7N8X-E is an awesome motherboard, I am really glad it was again possible to blow a bit of new life into it.
October 26th, 2009 on 10:58 pm
Hello Felix
How do you flash the Bios with this file.C18E1013.BIN
can you please help me… Do I have to create a Disk?
Many thanks for your help
Joe
October 27th, 2009 on 9:42 am
It’s actually pretty easy:
Hope that helps,
Felix
November 9th, 2009 on 5:25 am
I am paranoid about using a floppy for BIOS updates and want to do it with my BIOS programming prepped USB drive instead. However, as I am not using the “floppy only” ALT-F2 software provided by the motherboard, I need a compatible version to run on my USB drive that will allow me to install your C18E1013.bin file.
Is that possible?
November 12th, 2009 on 5:50 am
Hell Yeah ! Works perfect, thanks !
Long live Socket A !!!
November 12th, 2009 on 8:21 am
I think that this is well possible. There are many guides throughout the Internet how to set up a USB drive to do BIOS Flashing with it.
One pretty good guide is at http://www.biosflash.com/e/bios-boot-usb-stick.htm
After reading that you proceed to flash the bios as you would on DOS (i.e. using the BIOS flash tool ASUS provides (awdflash) to flash the BIOS)
November 18th, 2009 on 7:28 pm
Thank you so much, after finally figuring out how to flash the bios with a bootable CD-Rom this worked great…I have a 1.5 TB WD drive that wasnt being recognized with the old SATA bios. Your updated Bios did the trick!! Glad there are computer whizzes that share their hard work with the public.
November 27th, 2009 on 8:42 am
Do you have (or is the BIOS for) a v1.0 or v2.0 board?
November 27th, 2009 on 12:53 pm
My board is labeled with Rev. 1.01
January 6th, 2010 on 6:01 am
Could you attach both your original boot drive and your new drive to the SATA controller on your MB after you flashed the BIOS? Did you move your OS to the new drive? I too have a rev 1.01MB and I have been trying to use a Seagate 1TB Baracuda drive with it but to no avail. I went so far as to purchase a new PCI SATA controller but I have been unable to get it to work with my MB.
January 29th, 2010 on 2:20 am
I’ve got the same mainboard but when I try to flash the bios with your image it keeps giving me checksum errors.
February 2nd, 2010 on 4:24 am
After hours of time searching and a pc card that would not boot this did the trick. For some reason I had to rename it for award flash to take it, but it’s all good now.
Thank you thank you thank you.
February 23rd, 2010 on 10:28 am
Hi, really appreciated this post as is struggle with a similar problem namely getting my Spinpoint 1TB S-ATA II HDD up and running on my ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe – my manual tells me that the onboard S-ATA RAID Controller is Silicon Image SiI3112A though.
Therefore i have some questions:
- i have the A7N8X not the A7N8X-E so i’m wondering if I can use the Silicon Image BIOS provided here, anyone had the same problem and tried it?
I can’t find any information if this controller suport just plain SATA mode, without ANY raid configuration as is have just one HDD attached.
I’m really sick of this because I tried to get the HDD running on this board for weeks now, its in SATA I mode but once plugged in system won’t boot anymore and this SUCKS. BTW, i have a P-ATA drive attached and this is where my OS is installed. Please comment or give me a hint, any help is really (!) appreciated, THX!
February 23rd, 2010 on 7:06 pm
actually after getting more info on this topic i get more an more confues on how to achieve my goal:
- is it really required to slipstream the SATA Bios in to motherboard BIOS to get this working?
- i visited Silcion Image and found they provide IDE SATA drivers and RAID SATA drivers for my SATA controller Silicon Image SiI3112; i have no plans on using RAID mode so I assume using the IDE SATA Bios would be the right thing to do?