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A7N8X-E Deluxe and 1TB SATA Disks
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!
| Print article | This entry was posted by Felix Kaechele on August 11, 2009 at 2:19 pm, and is filed under Fedora Planet. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 10 months ago
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.
about 9 months ago
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
about 9 months ago
It’s actually pretty easy:
Hope that helps,
Felix
about 8 months ago
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?
about 8 months ago
Hell Yeah ! Works perfect, thanks !
Long live Socket A !!!
about 8 months ago
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)
about 8 months ago
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.
about 8 months ago
Do you have (or is the BIOS for) a v1.0 or v2.0 board?
about 8 months ago
My board is labeled with Rev. 1.01
about 6 months ago
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.
about 6 months ago
I’ve got the same mainboard but when I try to flash the bios with your image it keeps giving me checksum errors.
about 5 months ago
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.
about 5 months ago
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!
about 5 months ago
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?
about 1 month ago
This fixed my problem of adding a 1tb drive to my system. THANKS!!!
I did get an error (file not found) but I renamed the file and then the flash utility worked and after a reboot so did my new drive.
about 2 weeks ago
This works perfect!!! Gretz from Argentina!! Saludos.