crosshair v formula z asmedia 106 sata controller

[dawscaus]

I have the crosshair v formula z. I am having a hard time setting up my drives the way I want them. One reason I bought this board was because it had a total of 8 sata ports. What I wanted to do was the following:

Ports 1-4 raid 5 for storage
Port 5 Hdd with ubuntu
Port 6 Sdd with Windows
Port 7 optical drive
Port 8 run to my esata on my case front pannel

So all was good until I hooked my optical drive up and it is not recognized. So apparently the asmedia controller is ports 7 and 8 and are only good for storage I.e. (no optical drive and no boot drive) and to add on top of that they can not be put in raid.

So my question for the community is does anyone have a workaround for this problem. Maybe a modded bios that allows these ports to be used as boot devices. I think it is silly that this is not advertised by Asus. I read the manual and it did not say anything about the limitations of the asmedia controller.

I appreciate any insight possible.

[hax0rmort]

false. the asmedia controller absolutely DOES work for optical drives. Not sure how to diagnose your issue, but I would take a look at things one more time... Is the controller even on? you didnt tweak the settings did you? it's not required to use optical. I'd do a Optimized Setting reset and then see. Best luck

[TheNerdBench]

You didn't mention what OS you are using 🙂

If you are using Windows 7 then you will need to download and install the AS Media drivers from www.asus.com. I have used these ports for both HD and optical storage and you can boot from them.

I am going to guess that your optical drive wasn't detected as either the data cable wasn't installed, the power cable wasn't installed, the AS Media drivers are not installed, or the SATA port within the BIOS is disabled. Access the BIOS and see if the optical drive is detected in the BIOS; if not maybe you have a bad drive or the SATA Port is bad (switch the optical drive to another SATA port to verify).

Let us know what you find out.

[madcratebuilder]

You have two different SATA controllers, AMD 6Gbs 1-6, P0-P5 in BIOS.
ASMedia 6Gbs 1-2, Po and P1 in BIOS

What's listed in Devise manager assuming you are using Windows? Under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" you should have "AMD SATA Controller" and "Asmedia 106x SATA controller". These drivers are on the motherboard cd.

You may need to reassign priorities in the BIOS, it's under the "BOOT" section.

I have mine setup much like you do.
PO & P1 Raid0
P2&P3 Raid0
P4 hot dock
P5 hot dock

ASMedia ports
P0 Optical drive
P1 e-SATA

[dawscaus]

Ok posting back here.

First off. Thanks to everyone for the responses they were a big help because I was ready to give up.

The issue turned out to be some combination of bad sata connection to the board at the asmedia sata ports.

What I ended up doing to fix the issue is disconnected all the HDD sata connections that I had, and just connecting the ODD to the asmedia P0 port. I also restored to default settings and put a bootable disk in to make sure it was booting, and it worked!

so then I plugged all the other devices in and it worked like a charm. I think the real problem was with the sata cable I am using to connect to to my front panel esata port.

So the setup is complete with the following configuration:
PO, P1, P2, P3 Raid5
P4 SSD boot drive
P5 HDD hot dock

ASMedia ports
P0 Optical drive
P1 e-SATA

Thanks again for everyone's help!