Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Hannibal_92]

I have looked many places in the forums and cannot see an answer to my problem.

I run a Gigabyte P35 DS3R (latest firware: F13), with Vista Service Pack 2.

One Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB is recognized by Bios. It shows as "c:" in Vista. No pb.

The 2nd Barracuda is an older 7200.11 500Gb. It is not recognized by the bios, when plugged on a Sata port of the motherboard.

By the way, my DVD is also not recognized by the Bios, but it later shows as being available in Vista.

I have tried several SATA ports on the mother board, nothing changes.

Bios settings are set to defaults: SATA as IDE (not as RAID)

When I plugged my old Hitachi Deskstar (82 Gb) on the IDE port of the motherboard, that drive is recognized by the Bios. It is shown in Vista as E: But what is weird is that connecting the Hitachi makes the 2nd Barracuda to appear !

What makes it even weirder is that the 7200.11 is shown (when going under Computer/Manage/Storage) as 58Gb (it is actually 500Gb) and as a Logical Drive of the Hitachi, not as a separate disk device.

I can access the data, but I want to stop using the old Hitachi and I want to access the full 500Gb, not 10% of it!

Note that the Hitachi used to be the System drive, before I re-installed Vista on my new 1Tb. The 7200.11 used to be my "data" drive.

Please help! Thanks.

[Hannibal_92]

One more thing: I wanted to update the disk's firmware, so I have burned a CD-Rom with SeaTools, but I cannot boot on the DVD, so I wasn't successful.

[fzabkar]

According to the following manual, your motherboard has an Intel ICH9R RAID controller that supports 6 SATA ports. The board also has a GIGABYTE SATA2 chip that supports 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE port. The latter appears to be a JMicron JMB363 controller (GIGABYTE GBB363).

GA-P35-DS3R/ GA-P35-DS3/ GA-P35-S3 User's Manual:
http://download.gigabyte.ru/manual/motherboard_manual_ga-p35-ds3r(ds3)(s3)_2.0_e.pdf

ISTM that you should be connecting your drives to the ports labelled GSATAII0 and GSATAII1 in the Motherboard Layout diagram on page 7.

BTW, if your DVD doesn't appear in BIOS, then how did you manage to install Vista on your 1TB boot drive?

[Hannibal_92]

Thanks, fzabkar!

The problem remains, but thanks to your advice, I think I have further refined my understanding of it.

Here is what I did:

- motherboard ClearMOS, just in case. No impact

- set GSATA to "enable", to enable GSATA ports

- set GSATA to "IDE" (not HAIC, not RAID)

- checked that the bios shows all 6 IDE sata ports, numbered from 0 to 5

- plug both Seagates to those ports (they are purple) => none is recognized by the bios

- plug the DVD on SATA 1 (orange port, controlled by ICH9), it is recognized, but the seagates are not. I even booted on SeaTools and after a while it said it hadn't found any hard drive on the machine

- then I unplugged the 7200.11 500Gb drive, which made the 1Gb to be detected!

So right now my config is:

- P35 DS3R (F13)

- DVD on IDE channel 1 (master)

- Seagate 7200.12 1Tb (as "c:" on Vista SP2) on IDE channel 5 (master)

- old Hitachi is not plugged on IDE bar plug

- 7200.11 is not plugged. Note that I could access the data on that drive, conditional to plugging the old Hitachi

ISTM that the 7200.11 is confusing the motherboard enough to prevent it from recognizing the other disk (1Tb). Does that make sense to you?

Thanks again for your good ideas.

[Cantbecanit]

Flash the Cuda 500's to SD1a asap if they aren't already.

[Hannibal_92]

I am still having the pb.

I tried plugging the 7200.11 alone on the MB, it's never recognized by the Bios. I changed for a SATA cable I know is good, no improvement.

Cantbecanit, you suggest to flash the drive. Do you mean by using SeaTools (booting on the DVD-Rom)?

I have tried that and failed, because SeaTools can't see the drive as connected.

Thanks!

[Cantbecanit]

Sorry bud, I do this mostly after I finish work, or just after I've got up so the brain isn't always warmed up or topped up at the time, when I read your post I thought they were all working still, but it was only the 1TB that works still I see now.

If it's not in the bios you won't be able to flash it.

[fzabkar]

Your setup is very puzzling.

You say that the "7200.11 is shown (when going under Computer/Manage/Storage) as 58Gb (it is actually 500Gb) and as a Logical Drive of the Hitachi, not as a separate disk device".

Elsewhere you say that the drive is not detected by BIOS.

Can you tell us the firmware version of your 7200.11 drive?

When the 7200.11 appears as a 58GB drive, can you see it with a diagnostic tool such as HD Sentinel or HDDScan?

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

BTW, this photo may help others to help you:
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/13-128-050-04.jpg

Have you tried installing the drive's 1.5Gbps SATA speed limitation jumper? See section 3.2 of the following document.

Barracuda 7200.11 Serial ATA Product Manual, Rev. E:
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda%207200.11/100452348e.pdf

[Hannibal_92]

Thanks for your continuous support.

To answer your questions, fzabkar:

1. Yes, I know the config looks weird, but here it is: the 7200.11 is never detected by the Bios (tried all 8 Sata ports on the MB, alone, with the DVD, etc...).

However, when my old Hitachi Deskstar is plugged on the IDE port, the 7200.11 appears in Windows as a "Logical Drive" of that Hitachi.

2. No, I have not been able to find the firmware version of the 7200.11. It doesn't appear in the attached HD Sentinel report and I don't know where to find this firmware information

3. Yes the 1.5Gbps jumper is on the 7200.11 I did try to remove it but that didn't make the Bios to recognize the drive, unfortunately, so I put it back.

It was a great idea to run HD Sentinel. The full results are attached. In a nutshell, this is how I interpret them:

- Disk 0 is my old Deskstar, which is linked to two Drives in windows. E: and F: F is the Seagate 7200.11, which is shown as 58Gb drive, instead of being a 500Gb drive (see at the very bottom of the attached)

- Disk 1 is my new Seagate 7200.12 1Tb. C: in windows

- both disks are shown as 100% ok

Can you please read the attached report ? Your experienced eyes may see something that I missed !

Thanks

[Cantbecanit]

I might know what this is now, MIGHT I add, you are using an IDE drive as your C drive? and the Seagate is a Sata drive as a slave?

Things that can stop this happening

Bios - you need both Sata & IDE controllers enabled

Drive itself, you need a speed jumper if your MB is a Sata 1 supporter only

Drive may need formatting and a Sata driver loaded onto it if it's never been formatted before.

If I've repeated anything I do appollogise but I'm a bit stuck for time right now.