VIA VT8237 SATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility V4.80 can't find my third HDD!

In article ,
wrote:

Hello,

Ever since last night, I noticed my computer's ASUS K8V SE Deluxe
motherboard (1007
firmware -- latest non-beta release) does not boot up properly anymore
last night and
today. When my computer boots up, I see (nice typos and spacing problems
in it too :P):

VIA VT8237 SATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility V4.80

Scan Devices,Please wait...

HardWare Initiate failed, please check device!!!

The Bios does not be installed. Press g to continue!


After I G to continue, I am my Grub loader (Windows XP Pro. SP2 with all
updates and Linux)
for OS options (at least I know this part works). When I go to Windows,
I get a black
screen and hangs. If I go to safe mode, it gets stuck at agp440.sys
part. I did notice I
have to wait about five whole minutes for this part to time out before I
see XP's splash
screen. Obviously in Windows, I don't have my Seagate HDD (H: and I: drives).

I have no fancy RAID setup, I think my friend set this VIA VT8237 SATA
RAID up for the
third Seagate IDE 120 GB HDD. My friend set up the hardware so I think
he used this VIA
controller to access it back in 2005. He could never get the Promise
controller to work so
he used this one. Other drives are like according to CMOS/BIOS:

Primary Master: Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M612 X806, Ultra DMA-2
Primary Slave: Plextor CD-R PX-W1210A 1.0
Secondary Master: Quantum FireballP LM15 A35.0700, Ultra DMA-4,
S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status OK.
Secondary Slave: IC3L040AVER07-0 ER40A5A, Ultra DMA-5, S.M.A.R.T.
Capable and Status OK.
Note my old IDE/ATA setup.

I also noticed that in Windows, I don't have any sounds from my Audigy 2
ZS! Device Manager
shows no problems.

My detailed computer specifications can be found at
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm.../computers.txt (primary/gaming
system). I tried
disabling SATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility so I can get into Windows
faster (not wait for
that 5 minutes black screen), but it didn't help.

Any ideas? Thank you in advance.

Try disconnecting the disk drives from the Southbridge, and see if the
BIOS screen report changes. It could be that one of your storage devices
is holding a signal on the cable down, and preventing the scan of what is
on the cable. You could try removing one device at a time, or just remove
the whole works and add them back one at a time until it fails again.

If the error message remains, when no storage device is connected to
the motherboard, then it could be the motherboard that is bad.

Paul