Be carefull. Pavilion with AMD Turion owners

Hello,
this is my first thread on this forum, but I am reading it since more than 1 year. I am the owner of dv6510ew laptop equipped with AMD Turion TL-56 CPU and nForce chipset. Recently I realized that my laptop has a SATA hard drive installed, but guess what? HDD is working under Vista in UDMA 5 mode. I investigated some, and found out that On Chip nForce SATA Hard Drive Controller is set by default to IDE Compatibility mode. It seems that HP switched the mode to PATA, and does not allow the users to change the mode of this controller. There is no option in the laptop's BIOS, and it is impossible to switch the mode. I tried to install the nForce Serial ATA Controller from nVidia webpage by hand, but Vista cannot find the right device to use the driver. So I am unhappy to have two Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controllers under "Device Manager" and one SATA HDD working in PATA mode. The screen shot from PC Wizard 2008 showing my nForce Controller settings is attached to this post.

I have contacted HP Total Care support, but it was more than pain in the butt. Quality level of HP support is near zero, and incompetence level is high like Mt. Everest.

Anyway, I am considering to return the laptop, because it is still under warranty. My colegue, who owns dv6740ew laptop has the same situation. Hard Drive is SATA, but no SATA under Vista.

I would like to ask all users having laptops similar to mine (dv6xxx with AMD Turion and nForce chipset) for checking their systems to confirm the situation and send complaints to HP, maybe after that they will be able to see the problem and do something to resolve that. I am sure that the option in BIOS "On chip SATA mode" will make me happy and the problem will be gone. People, don't let the HP to ignore and mislead us, and fool us by fake SATA laptops.

I am not a native English speaker, but I hope you understand, what I try to say.

Best regards for all laptop owners and users (not only HP one's).

 

I'll take a look at mine when I get home. Thanks for the info.

 

Hello,
does anyone have the same problem as mine? In addition to my first post I attached "Device Manager" screen shot of my notebook.

 

Just as a note the cd drive in the laptop is IDE. I have an intel dv6000 and i know that on dv8000's they do have a sata option under the bios. Tomarrow i will check on a tx1000 for you.

 

Tippey764, thanks for your quick response. I have the latest F.30 BIOS installed, but there is no option to switch the mode of nForce hard drive controller. The dv6000's with Intel chipset have got the option, but notebooks with AMD have not. It's true that DVD drive is IDE, and it is working under Vista in Multi-Word DMA 2 mode, but I have Fujitsu SATA HDD, but it is working in UDMA 5 mode. I suppose that there should be two separate controllers - first one for DVD and second one for HDD. I am confused, because there are two Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controllers in Device Manager, and DVD and HDD are connected to ATA Channel 0 (see screen shots). I compared the chipset drivers from HP with nForce chipset drivers from nVidia, and the result is as follows:
HP drivers don't have serial_ide folder included. I assume, that HP removed it consciously, but I don't know why? Were there any compatibility issues or something?

 

I have an extra pre dv6500t lying around it has a intel 945 chipset like my brotheres dv8000 (Gm vs pm but regardless) Anyways it does have sata native support option too. My dv6500t dosent have that option though. Does your dv6000 have the nvidia 6150 chipset or the 7150?

 

did you do a clean install of Vista? did you try downloading the chipset drivers and SATA driveres from the hp website? just making sure..

 

I did the clean install, I did the system recovery either. I downloaded latest chipset drivers from hp, installed them, but as I mentioned before there is no sata_ide driver included and therefore I guess, that chipset is not working in SATA native mode. My laptop has nForce 520 chipset (MCP65) and nVidia 8400 GS graphics.

 

Funny, on my DV9700T ATA 0 is for the cdrom, and ATA 1 is for the hard drives, but under advanced settings, there's a whole lot of nothing. No information at all.

However further down the list I see:

Intel(R) ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2850


and

Intel(R) ICH8M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller

 

dkwhite, have you got an option in laptop's BIOS, which allows you to switch the On Chip SATA mode? In my laptop there is no such option in BIOS.

 

nope. There are very few options available in the BIOS.

 

In my laptop Hardware ID's for IDE Controllers are DEV_0448 and DEV_045D, which means:

DEV_0448=”pciide” nForce 560/520 MCP65 P-ATA Controller
DEV_044C=”nvgts” nForce 560/520 MCP65 RAID Controller
DEV_044D=”nvgts” nForce 560/520 MCP65 AHCI Controller
DEV_044E=”nvgts” MCP67D AHCI Controller
DEV_045D=”pciide” nForce 560/520 MCP65 S-ATAController(IDE mode)

I don't know how to enable DEV_044D device to install nVidia nForce Serial ATA Controller. Doea anyone know how to do this?

 

How much of a performance difference is there in... native? mode versus IDE? On a laptop I doubt it makes much difference, but given the number of very confused Intel users who've wondered why WinXP install discs can't find their SATA HD (Vista doesn't have this problem) I can see the logic in using IDE mode by default. Even my desktop's AMD 790X chipset board defaults to IDE mode, which I didn't bother to change back after the last time I updated the BIOS and forgot about it.

On a server I can see where some of the fancy SATA controller tricks might be useful, but a single user machine...?

It would be nice if the HP BIOS gave you the option of selecting which mode though, just because. (And didn't have that bleepin' wireless card whitelist...)

Worst case scenario: given the problems that NVIDIA has historically had with their drive controllers, forcing the simpler IDE mode might be for safety.

 

brianstretch,
you are right, it would be nice to have this option for selecting the mode. Regarding the performance difference it seems that UDMA5 is ATA100, which means that HDD works at full speed, and perhaps SATA-150 mode won't give too much performance boost. I just wanted to compare the performance between IDE and SATA mode, but I cannot do this if there is no option to switch the mode. Lack of this option is the only complain in my laptop.

 

Only laptops with the intel nine fourty five chipset have options for sata native support in their bios. <My numbers on my keyboard arnt working for some reason thats why i typed it out if you were wondering>

 

I checked on a tx1000 today with an nvidia 6150 chipset or what ever its called and i have an nforce sata controller under bios

 

Everyone, thanks for your responses.

 

The driver found here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_vista_15.23.html includes DEV_044D among others.
I installed it on my DV6233 (which is nForce 410) and though the port in device manager shows transfer mode DMA, when I click on Speed test it says 'current transfer mode is Serial ATA Generation 1 - 1.5G'. See attached.

 

My laptop also has this and its in the buisness range of laptops ive posted about it several times! no one seems to know the answer

 

Yea, I doubt it makes any difference whatsoever. Your laptop HDD probably isn't even fast enough to saturate an IDE bus at peak transfer rates. Unless you're using a SSD I would just stop worrying about it.

 

booyoo,
you are lucky. It seems that your laptop has SATA native mode enabled. That's way you are able to install the nForce SATA driver. I tried to do this several times, but with no success. Vista cannot discover the DEV_44D device.