VIA VT8237/R issues with SATA-II drives

Author on 19 March, 2011 | Print | Bookmark
Symptom: SATA-II drive is not detected in BIOS.

Basically ANY Via chipset mainboard which uses the VIA VT8237 or VT8237R southbridge chipset, does NOT support SATA-II (3.0gb/s) drives.

You may have some success if you are able to jumper the drive to SATA-I (1.5gb/s) operation mode, but in the majority of situations this is not guaranteed to work either.

This is a known unfixable issue; there is no BIOS or driver update that can resolve this.

Solution:
  • Use a SATA-I drive instead (hard to find now)
  • Use a PATA (IDE) drive instead (still plenty available)
  • If you deperately need your SATA-II drive to work, use an add-in PCI SATA controller card (that natively supports these drives)
  • Or upgrade your mainboard to one that does not use this southbridge chipset.

See: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1012674/via-warns-hard-drive-chipset-incompatibility

And for plenty more on this:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=via+vt8237+sata+2

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Category: MSI motherboards for Intel CPUs, MSI VIA chipset motherboards

Last updated on 19 March, 2011 with 10151 views