pesky sata hardrives

[Q_B]

Ok ... first lemme tell you this ... i am THE LEAST TECH GUY who could reply to you...

That said, i had a problem with my SATA hdd some time ago ... had to replace disk 3 times (it had warranty, so no prob), even had both SEAGATE and MAXTOR disks.

Guy on the tech support said, by the third disk replacement, it sure was a problem with XP and its SATA management, you had to have SP2 and latest updates.

Now if this is anywhere near truth, i honestly don't know. What i know is that since then to the present day (some 3 months maibe) i had no more problems.

Just to clarify, the problem i was having (wich seems to be similar to yours) was that, aparently without any reason or recognizable pattern, all was fine, and the next day the bastard wouldn't boot. Trying to re-install windows was of no use too, it freezed during the partition/format, if i remember correctly.

Anyways, best luck to you man.

[kex]

cheers for the reply did swapping the drive work ?

as ive got sp2 installed on the drive and also sp2 is slipstreamed into my instalation

[kex]

i guesse im getting a little desperate at the momment as no one wanted to answer my question and thiers no info on my mobo any ware to be honest even abits site is very low on info.


basically it comes down to this my mobo seems to boot ok from a random ide hardrive , but my raptor just wont be reconised properley its sees the drive at 0gb in the bios or 200 something gb,

but its a 36gb hdd so i dunno what it thinks it is ,

any one have any ideas? really im getting quite low on ideas or its takeing back hdd time :(



even if its just a random thought or idea






and yeah i knows its a double post hey its the only way i was gonna get anyones attention

[Q_B]

I feel your pain man ... really do ... as i said, already been there ... 3 times lol.

Is your XP Pro or Home Ed?

[danhua76]

i actually recently bought a 36gb raptor drive and ran into a similar prob. the bios only read it as an 8gb drive and winxp and win2k both had problems formatting the drive and installing the os. when there was a successful install, it would would follow by a non-bootable drive a couple of resets later.

all this is with a new mobo install. i have the gigabyte nforce3 board with an athlon64 3000. i decided to return the drive for an exchange of an exact duplicate. the newer one works fine, and haven't given me any major problems...yet. it's been about three weeks since the install.

at this point i'm convinced that eventhough these raptor drives a blazingly fast, there is a quality issue with these drives. similar to the old ibm deskstar drives, aka, "death"star drives. i'm suspecting that sata is having a harder time spinning at 10k rpm. remember that sata is still 'ata' (ide) and that the only difference is how data is accessed (serial (sata) vs. parallel (ata/ide). scsi doesn't have problems at 10k rpm since its technology is different. this is only a guess though, i could be totally off base. it just could be that this batch of raptor drives (those shipped in the last 3 months from the manufacturer) could have had a higher defect ratio than other batches that were shipped out.

anyhow, one last thing you can try is installing that current raptor drive of yours into another system that has sata. if it still doesn't work, then it most certainly is the drive. otherwise it could be your mobo sata controller. at that point, get yourself a pci sata controller and hook it up to that and see if it works. at worst, you'll have to return that raptor for another like i did.

ok, hope that helps.

[kex]

bloody strange my computer will not reconize the raptor at 2500xp but will at 3200xp :? wtf when my cpu is a 2500xp chip as well

dam my abit va20 mobo never get this board ever


i should probally report this as a bug but well xp range is dead now apart from the semprons

[danhua76]

try downloading the lastest chipset drivers for that board and newer bios. this may help fix your sata controller problem.

[kex]

cheers everyone for you help,

ive got the hard drive going in that the os sees it but i have the problem now that when try to start windows the loading bar just goes round and a round ,

the loading doesnt actually seem to be getting anywhere ive tried my old ide hard drive and it seems to be doing the same now in just not loading windows past the loading menu .

this happens on the first reboot into gui install of windows and on a installed version of windows ,

oh yeah ive also got the newer sata drivers they dont seem to change much it was in the end the old floppy i had the drivers on just died .

oh yeah i forgot to mention its xp pro

[danhua76]

hehe :) you said "floppy". i haven't used a floppy in years. make sure you back-up all your drivers on a cd. it'll last you a bit longer.

[kex]

windows xps sata only supports floppy disks , i had to go out and find a random floppy drive just to get it working

[danhua76]

really? i was able to install sata drivers via cd during the win xp pro install. the installation usually installs generic cd-rom drivers before the actual windows install so that you can install storage controller drivers before the install begins. you should look into that.

[kex]

i guesse the topic has changed now that windows wont boot off the drive properley hmmm , my ide ive got to boot once but i havent tried it again , it looks like another install on the sata and see were it gets me if not im returning it on saturday , it should be within it 28 day warranty with pcworld

[danhua76]

let me clarify how i got to use a cd for the sata drivers to install during windows setup:

as soon as you get the blue set-up screen press 'f8' (i think, windows will tell you which f key to press) so that windows knows that you need to install an additional large storage controller. after it installs its default set of drivers, it will prompt you to insert the cd with the driver you want to install. after that is done, you should be able to install windows on the sata drive. good luck!

[kex]

strange in my one only floppy drives are acessable ive even slipstreamed xp into the install,

but dam it floppy's dont matter its satas that im pissed with http://cgtalk.com/images/smilies/sad.gif

[danhua76]

ok, so i took a look at your mobo's specs. here are some things that i thought of:

1. download and install the latest via chipset drivers for the bios.
2. check the bios to make sure that you've enabled sata to be bootable. it may be that sata is defaulted as raid only. you may have to set sata as 'base' and not 'raid'
3. check with abit about sata issues with this mobo (if any). make sure from abit that sata can be used as a bootable and not as raid storage.

[kex]

i found out that actually changing my fsb affects the ability of your sata drives.

by changing the fsb of my cpu back to 200fsb rather than 165 which i was using for 2500xp tit got my sata working.

its bloody weird how sensitive sata is though i can see now how you can destroy raid arrays.

this problem was all down to a fussy sata controller ladies and gentlemen

[danhua76]

wow! that's good to know. since you got a fussy sata controller, it may be that you need to install a updated chipset driver for you bios. the chipset on your mobo that controls the hdd does communicate through the fsb. so that being the case, if changing your fsb causes problems, a chipset driver update may fix it. however, since it's working now, it really doesn't matter. good job! :thumbsup:

[kex]

il still have to see if counter strike source crashs till then fingers crossed ,


i hope this thread has been useful for any one with problems with sata drives i think weve touched on every problem really with these buggers

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