(Mostly for my own records, and any poor sap who ends up in the same Google hell I was in for a few hours)

My most recent slice of computer repair work started out simple enough: an HP Pavilion a420n with a 0x0A STOP error caused by some driver or another failing during Windows boot. Safe mode worked, nothing else did. I quickly concluded (after listening to the hard drive clanking and creaking) that the HD was going bad (it WAS a Maxtor, after all) and in the process of doing so had nixed some crucial driver (probably LAN), and after confirming with my client, ordered a new harddrive out of pocket with the intent of being reimbursed at invoice time. The old Maxtor was PATA, so I originally started looking for a PATA replacement, but then noticed a pair of SATA ports on the mobo. With more of a selection in SATA, I decided to go for it and upgrade the guy. 2 days later, the drive (a Seagate 7200.10 80gb) shows up. I pop it in, get my clonezilla disk ready to start hand-picking his old files to recover, and I'm met with "NO HARD DRIVE FOUND."


Obviously I was pissed, having put my own money up for a drive I had no use for, being a dedicated notebook user for the time being.


2 hours, one useless chat with HP support, and innumerable google searches later, I figured out that the VIA 8237 Southbridge (used in the A7V8X-LA motherboard, the bastard cousin of the Asus A7V8X-MX) does not support SATA2 (3.0Gbit/s). Jumpering the drive (thanks for not including a jumper, TigerDirect/Seagate!) solved the problem just nicely, and I'll be raking in my profit soon enough.

It did piss me off that this was not documented on HP's site OR in their technical division's files (although the tech DID mention something about the chipset not supporting RAID, which got me researching it to begin with). Just another reason never to buy a whole desktop, I guess.