The HP M2N78-LA CONUNDRUM

[CHESSTUR]

Not sure if this is the place for this but I’m out of ideas.

Background information: A certain young lad who is keen on hardware brought his PC to me because my daughter told him I worked on computers. He’s 10. He wanted Windows 10 64 bit on his PC and he wanted more RAM. He also wanted to do a little low level gaming on his 12 year old PC.

Execution: I popped open the case and had a look under the hood. I noticed that the only drive that was connected to the main board was a CD/DVD ROM drive and that the mechanical hard drive (sporting a Windows 10 32bit o/s) was connected to a two port SATA expansion card. I thought that was a rather odd place to be running the operating system from as it was the only o/s on the unit. That was all the drives this unit had.

The unit came with 6 GB of RAM (2X3) so adding another stick made that part of the upgrade easy. The PC now has 8GB of RAM (2X4). I explained to the lad that he would not be able to use all the RAM until we finished installing the 64bit o/s he wanted, connected the peripherals and fired up the PC. The RAM posted (just as expected) and the operating system showed the hard drive running at 100% on the task manager. This comes as no surprise as I’m accustomed to those old 500GB Seagate slim jobs doing this and I was going to reinstall the replacement o/s on a different drive anyway.

The CPU proved to be an AMD Athlon II 64 bit quad core. After checking out a few more things I rebooted the unit and proceeded to attempt to enter the BIOS. Nope. No such deal. It was hard enough just to get setup to post which consisted of listing one drive and giving me the option of rebooting. After numerous attempts at getting into the BIOS I shut the unit down and removed the expansion card to see if this wasn’t causing some interruption in the BIOS. The only option I got was the ESC which is the setup on this HP model. At this point the CD/DVD ROM did not register.

Nothing connected to the native SATA ports registered. Knowing this, I connected the CD/DVD ROM to the expansion card and reinstalled the card and the hard drive (that was slaving away @ 100% capacity) and both drives showed in the setup. I attempted to access the BIOS again. Nope. Not a chance. I jumpered the CMOS and pulled the battery. Waited about 20 minutes and set back the jumpers and put in a fresh battery. Plugged it back in and switched it on - still no BIOS. The operating system fired up, as usual, despite the hard drive working overtime.

I attempted a USB installation with the hard drive disconnected and received an error message informing me that installation would not be possible. I also received a new F9 diagnostics option on the splash screen upon reconnect and reboot with old o/s. I ran F9. Diagnostics stated what I already knew: SATA ports 1- 4 were not functional and to contact HP support. A little nudge forward, I thought. The CD/DVD ROM also made an appearance, being plugged into the expansion card instead of the main board. Alas, I could not get the 64 bit o/s to install. The Windows installation kept reporting a missing driver. At this point I became very suspicious of this two port expansion card. I pulled the very cheap looking card and replaced it with a SATA expansion card using the Asmedia 106X driver. Repeatedly pushing the delete key I finally managed to get into the BIOS. I set BIOS to default, rebooted, and checked BIOS again. In the BIOS all four ports were reported enabled. Success! I thought.

Nothing I connected to any of the four SATA ports would register. I enabled and re-enabled these in BIOS to no avail. I tried pulling the card again and still nothing. Yes, I could finally access the BIOS with or without the expansion card but I still could not get these ports to work. The HP F9 Diagnostics reported the RAM was good but still reported that the onboard SATA was not functional. I also noticed that the sticker on the side of the case stated that the unit originally came with a 64 bit operating system. Since I could run the CD/DVD ROM I thought I’d try installing Windows 10 this way. I used a standard Windows 10 64bit installation disc with a different 500 GB mechanical drive and behold! Installation was a success!

I updated all the drivers and did all the Windows 10 updates that were applicable to the unit. One thing is still nagging me:

I still can’t get those 4 onboard SATA ports to work. The o/s is still running on an expansion card howbeit a better card. Any suggestions?

[CHESSTUR]

update After doing some further research I discovered that this is a common issue with this system board. There seems to be no fix for it apart from physically removing the SATA controller and soldering in a new one. Since I wasn’t about to do that I just ran with the card in the PCIe slot and told the lad he needs to get a new system board. (Or better yet, a new system.) Once it is verified that the controller is the issue no amount of installing the drivers will fix it.

[Trooper_ish]

So the previous tech seems to have came to the same conclusion, and worked out a $15 pci card was cheaper than a new mobo+cpu+ram? Looks like he must have been right.

Shame one can’t “comment” hardware changes like one can in a program… apart from a sticker on a chip saying “dead”.

Oh, I have an old board with dead audio. I should really mark that for future me not to get disappointed….

[CHESSTUR]

:::grins::: Admittedly that does appear to be the case. But man, what a cheap card. It wouldn’t even let me install a 64 bit o/s. I should take a pic of it. Then again, the tech probably wasn’t getting much for his effort anyway and it’s not as though this was a high end PC. Anyway the lad did leave with what he asked for: 64 bit Win 10, more memory, a functional CD/DVD ROM and a bit more than what he asked for: a better card, a recovery disc, a full diagnostic, and some software to help him along. He kept trying to give me money but I wasn’t having it. Any kid that keen on hardware deserves a bit of a break.

oh Afterthought. I had an Asus Sabertooth Z87 give me trouble with onboard sound. It just wasn’t happening so I fixed it with Creative SB Titanium card. Better sound and more options. They’re still happy with it. Read and write speeds are not an issue in this regard.