Acer T650 Motherboard - SATA problem

[dicky96]

Hi guys
Here is another fix it for the hell of it motherboard

Its a RC410-M2 REV .0 motherboard from an Acer T650 desktop

It has a problem with the SATA ports

If I try to install Windows (Any version) from DVD or from USB it gets to the point where it wants to format the HDD and says there is no HDD present. I have tried with several SATA drives and with different cables. The SATA drive detects in the BIOS just fine

I installed Windows 7 on a SATA hard drive from USB flash drive on a similar motherboard. I then fit that hard drive on this motherboard it boots to the point where the animated windows logo appears and then crashes and reboots

I then tried to install windows on an IDE drive (this motherboard supports both) and that works. If I boot from the IDE drive into Windows 7 with a SATA drive attached, Windows does not see the SATA drive - even though the BIOS does. I've tried different SATA ports.

My best guess is that something is wrong with the South Bridge, or something is screwed up in the BIOS. I would like to fix it for educational value. Any suggestions?

[SMDFlea]

Re: Acer T650 Motherboard - SATA problem

Have you tried installing SATA drivers from an old skool floppy during the install,where you have to press F6 (if i remember)

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/ID/conten...product/393;-;

[dicky96]

Re: Acer T650 Motherboard - SATA problem

Thanks SMDFlea
Not quite how you suggested it, but I installed the SATA driver from the link you provided (even though it was an XP driver and this is Windows 7) and everything now works - I can see the SATA drive in Windows

I did learn something useful from this so it was worthwhile

I've attached a pic of the motherboard sa I forgot to do so earlier. It seems that neither XP nor Windows 7 will recognise that ULI south bridge chip properly without the third party driver installed.

[piernov]

Re: Acer T650 Motherboard - SATA problem

Refurbished a Unika computer with that garbage ECS RC410-M2 motherboard not long ago…

Floppy_AA1697.zip is the ULi M1573 SATA driver that worked for me, it's made for Vista 32-bit/64-bit but it seems like it works on Windows 10 1909 64-bit. In my case the system drive is on IDE not SATA so cannot guarantee it's 100% stable.

5317_PG219_Vista_R148.zip is the Realtek ALC880 audio codec driver.
Realtek never released a driver for ALC880 compatible with Vista 64 and up... but starting from release 1.48 which brings Vista support, the driver actually works with ALC880 on Vista 64 as well. The .inf is not written properly for Windows to be able to recognize the driver automatically, so you have to force installation with the Vista64/HDX.inf file even though Windows warns you it may not be compatible. But before that you have to disable driver signature enforcement as those drivers are not signed properly. Some versions later they dropped the support so I don't know which ones work, I tried only 1.48 here, Windows 10 1909 64-bit. Surprisingly audio seems to be working properly.


In my case the board also had a corrupt BIOS so it couldn't boot anything. It was an OEM BIOS with Unika logo from an older release of the ECS BIOS. I flashed the official ECS bios which fixed it and brought Pentium D 9xx compatibility (required for Windows 10), but I lost floppy disk support for some reason (the BIOS menu for floppy disk is empty). No big deal as the floppy drive bay was empty and I just put a card reader in there instead. There's no way to make it work with more than 2GB of RAM unfortunately.