ASUS P5A-B Super socket 7 motherboard with a SSD \ VOGONS

ASUS P5A-B Super socket 7 motherboard with a SSD

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First post, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-10, 05:03

holaplaneta Offline

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Hi there guys,

Thanks to the many fascinating threads in this forum and the good youtubers that inspire others, I just recently got together the following:

AMD K6 3+ 450ACZ
ASUS P5A-B rev1.04 motherboard without integrated audio
512MB (2X256MB) RAM MEMORY
3dfx VOODOO 3 3000D AGP
Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold CT4390 (for DOS)
Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Aureal Vortex 2 (for WIN98)
SYBA SD-V2-5V USB 2.0 PCI card with NEC D720100 chipset (tried one with the NEC D720101 one before and it was never detected by WIN98SE)
Plextor PlexWriter PX-W5224TA 52/24/52A CD-R/RW Drive
MPU-401 PC-MIDI ISA Card

I will soon add a 3.5¨ floppy drive and eventually a GOTEK floppy emulator too.

However, I ran into a problem. I want to use either a 120GB or 128GB SSD with it but had not been successful.
I got a Transcend 120 GB TLC SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Drive (TS120GSSD220S) and I have tried to use it with these two IDE to SATA adapters (both use the Marvell - 88SA8052 chipset) with no luck:
-StarTech.com IDE to SATA Hard Drive - 40-Pin PATA to 2.5" SATA HDD Converter (IDE2SAT2)
-DeLOCK Converter SATA > IDE - SATA-150 - 150MBps - Ultra ATA 133 (61702)

The SSD is not being recognized by the computer. I tried different IDE ports on the mobo, different IDE cables and nothing. I used another older SATA Hard Drive (non SSD Hitachi Ultrastar A7K3000 2TB HUA723020ALA641 (0F12470) 2TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM SATA III) and this one was actually recognized by the system, so now I know the SDD is at fault.

The SDD read well on my WIN10 computer and I have formatted it to FAT32 with guiformat.exe but still it the old pc won´t recognize it at startup.

My guess is that the mobo chipset or BIOS is not recognizing the SSD for some reason I must admit I do not know. I have perused and read these forums trying to understand how old BIOS and newer SSD configurations work together but I must confess that I could not get a very clear picture on where exactly the issue is, so I can either mod it, solve it or get another SSD that actually works with this setup.

I wanted to ask for your recommendations and suggestions on what model of SSD I should get to work with a setup like this. Ideally I would like it to be a 2.5” SSD in the 120GB to 128GB range if possible, please. I already made the investment on these two IDE to SATA adapters (second one I got thinking the first one was at fault) and I actually would like to eventually use two 128GB in this machine.

Hopefully there are some options out there.

Thank you for your time and help! I hope you are staying safe enjoying a lot of DOS gaming.

Last edited by holaplaneta on 2020-04-18, 01:22. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 13, by BinaryDemon

Posted on 2020-04-10, 05:22

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You might want to try the latest bios version available for your board, I suspect you might have a limit of 8gb or 32gb. Drive overlay software might be another option.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 2 of 13, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-10, 05:32

holaplaneta Offline

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BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-04-10, 05:22:

I suspect you might have a limit of 8gb or 32gb.

Thanks for the reply. Just one question: would it make sense for the computer to recognize the other 2TB HDD like it did, if the BIOS has this limitation?

Reply 3 of 13, by BinaryDemon

Posted on 2020-04-10, 13:20

BinaryDemon Offline

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holaplaneta wrote on 2020-04-10, 05:32:

Thanks for the reply. Just one question: would it make sense for the computer to recognize the other 2TB HDD like it did, if the BIOS has this limitation?

I don’t know, when you say recognized it - I can’t imagine it saw the correct capacity? I’d speculate maybe the 2tb has better adherence the ide/SATA specifications.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 4 of 13, by Nabors

Posted on 2020-04-10, 16:06

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I suspect the limit is 80gb my P5A also wont work with a 120GB SSD but works fine with a 64GB.

Reply 5 of 13, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-11, 00:04

holaplaneta Offline

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Nabors wrote on 2020-04-10, 16:06:

I suspect the limit is 80gb my P5A also wont work with a 120GB SSD but works fine with a 64GB.

This is a great tip. Thanks!

Is there a way I could format (partition?) my 120gb SSD to make it pass as a 80GB one so maybe the P5A-B mobo will recognize it?

Reply 6 of 13, by texterted

Posted on 2020-04-11, 00:13

texterted Offline

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Grab a copy of "Super F Disk" it'll let you format it how you like.

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/super_fdisk.html

Cheers

Ted

98se/W2K :- Asus A8v Dlx. A-64 3500+, 512 mb ddr, Radeon 9800 Pro, SB Live.
XP Pro:- Asus P5 Q SE Plus, C2D E8400, 4 Gig DDR2, Radeon HD4870, SB Audigy 2ZS.

Reply 7 of 13, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-11, 01:50

holaplaneta Offline

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Thank you for your recommendations, I finally found the culprit. It was the BIOS.

I realized that it was weird that the 2TB Hitachi drive was being recognized with all its capacity. So I decided to install windows 98 SE on it. From there I went and flashed the bios with the AFLASH.EXE tool...

The flash went well and it actually fixed an error that kept appearing with the cpu voltage even when the jumpers are correctly set to 2.0V.

I removed the 2TB HDD and put the 120GB SDD and... voilà! Now it recognizes the whole capacity of the SSD drive from the boot up. I just reinstalled WIN98SE on it again and now it seems to be working perfectly.

Thanks for your help, have a great weekend.

Reply 8 of 13, by SpectriaForce

Posted on 2020-04-14, 21:01

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Does it boot to Windows with DMA mode on?

Reply 9 of 13, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-18, 00:54

holaplaneta Offline

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I am not 100% sure if what you are looking for is this but I think it does since it only has the DISABLE and AUTO options in the BIOS and it has always been set to AUTO.

I also activated the S.M.A.R.T. HDD capability and it seems to be working OK.

Reply 10 of 13, by pentiumspeed

Posted on 2020-04-19, 18:00

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What the previous poster said is, does DMA is on in windows?

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 11 of 13, by holaplaneta

Posted on 2020-04-25, 07:59

holaplaneta Offline

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Sure it does support DMA. It does it so much that the Settings for DAM for the Hard Drive in the Device Manager properties was already ticked. I suppose from detecting the BIOS settings.

Reply 12 of 13, by kolderman

Posted on 2020-04-25, 11:59

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> Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold CT4390 (for DOS)

I hope you mean DOS games not DOS. It is practically a crime to not make best use of the AWE64s inbuilt ram for soundfonts which you can only do under Win98.

Reply 13 of 13, by pentiumspeed

Posted on 2020-04-25, 14:26

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No, Look into windows 98SE and check the device manager under the drives is it DMA on or not?

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

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