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

[bigflump]

Hi,

My new ST350032OAS works fine until I power down the PC,  the problem is that when I next power up the PC(from a cold start) the ST350032OAS dissapeared from the BIOS.

If I then immediatly restart the PC, the hard drive reappears...and windows boots up fine.

Its the only hard drive in my PC, and so far ive tried different cables, and different SATA Sockets but it made no difference. 

Anyone got any ideas why its not there when I first powerup the PC?

OS             : Vista Home Premium

Mtherboard:  Gigabytes GA-M57SLI-S4

Processor : AMD 64X2 5200+

Graphics   : Sapphire X1650

[piltaf]

Firmware version of the drive?

[bigflump]

The firmware is version SD15, could this be fixed by a firmware update?

any advice would be very appreciated thanks .

[bigflump]

Will the new firmware update fix this problem?

[piltaf]

No it will not. You will need to recover the drive from what is called the "BUSY" state. The drive locks into this mode due to a bug in the SD15 firmware. Your data is still all there, but you have to unlock the drive from this state before you can retrieve your data and upgrade the Firmware.

You have a few options:

Send it to a DR company and pay big bucks

Find out if Seagate will recover your drive from this state (DO NOT RMA YOUR DRIVE, you will get a new disk and all data will be gone)

Find the Solution to solve this posted online (requires some hardware($20 worth) and some advanced PC knowledge)

Feel free to PM me.

[bigflump]

thanks for the help pilaf, fortunatley the drives not totally  locked up (yet) and I havent lost any data becuase I dont trust it enough to save anything important on.

The problem is when I first start the PC, the drive has  dissapeared from the BIOS and I have to use the BIOS rescan to find it again.

From then on its fine, if do a quick restart etc,  until I power off the PC and it dissapears again.

I've read about the BSY state, any idea if  the new firmware fix's this problem?

[piltaf]

Sounds more like your BIOS battery needs to be replaced.

[bigflump]

I considered that, but the BIOS remembers the other settings such as passwords, date and time etc. so I think the batterys ok.

Ive just discovered that despite the drive not showing in BIOS,  if I boot up from a different HDD, then VISTA manages to find the missing drive,

Could it be a BIOS driver issue?  Maybe the drive only appears after VISTA has loaded its own drivers? 

Thanks for any help

[bigflump · Accepted solution]

6 days and nights...finally problem solved

Posting the solution, hopefully it will help someone else.

SATA drives take longer to spin upto speed, therefore the BIOS can't find it becuase the drives still starting up.

Solution is to slow the BIOS down, I did this by making it search for a floppy disk drive, before checking for hard disks.

This gives the SATA drive extra time to get upto speed, and now the BIOS finds it everytime.

Now thats sorted, do I need to update my ST350032OAS SD15 firmware to stop it from failing in 3 months time?

Message Edited by bigflump on 01-29-2009 04:20 PM

[piltaf]

If it is on the affected drive list, then yes, update it as soon as you can!

That is a really odd issue you had. I have never heard of that before.