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

[Cryonisis]

Hi all,

Last week I purchased one of these drives from Amazon, plugged it in and partitioned it with Paragon Partition Manager 9 Professional (PPM9) into a 391.2GB partition ( Partition A) and a 1006GB partition (Partition B). I set both of them up to be formatted both as NTFS. Partition A formatted no problem but when I tried to format Partition B, PPM9 gave me an IO error.

I then tried to format the drive via the Windows command prompt and got the following error messages: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable", "The first NTFS boot sector is unwritable", "All NTFS boot sectors are unwritable. Cannot continue", "Format failed".

I contacted Seagate and was advised to download Seatools for DOS and run the 2 tests. I ran the short test which came up clean. However, the long test did not even finsih to give me a report. It just had some read error and exited the program automatically. I used various tools found on the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com) and ran various surface scans but could not identify the problem and eventually I returned the drive to Amazon.

Today I received my new drive and I had EXACTLY the same problem.

My current hardware is as follows:

Motherboard:     Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe

Chipset:            Nvidia nForce 590 SLI

CPU:                 AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+

Memory:            4GB RAM

OS:                   Vista Ultimate 32 bit

HDD's:              1 x 320GB PATA HDD

                          1 x 160GB SATA II HDD (System drive)

                          1 x 1500GB SATA II HDD

                          1 x 200GB SATA II HDD

I have NOT installed the nForce Serial ATA drivers for the mothboard as I have heard these cause endless problems.

Do I have REALLY bad luck and had 2 dud drives or is there something else I am missing? Is this a known problem and is there a known solution? Should I update my BIOS or install some or other SATA drivers to allow this to work properly?

 Thanking you in advance for all your help.

Cryo

EDIT: I see a lot of noise is being made about firmware problems on this drive. I downloaded the drivedetect tool to see what firmware version I have and it only picks up my Hitachi PATA drive but NONE of my 3 Seagate SATA drives. Seatools for Windows has the same problem. It cannot see my 3 x Seagate SATA drives but sees the Hitatchi PATA one. Any suggestions?

Message Edited by Cryonisis on 05-02-2009 06:27 PM

Message Edited by Cryonisis on 05-02-2009 06:32 PM

[Cantbecanit]

Remove all the other drives before you try to format the drive, you can try the normal way or you can slave it to an existing O/S and do it through disc management, I'd try to get a whole disc format done before using the partition software myself, then play about with partitions, the PATA drive being on there won't help either.

[Cryonisis · Accepted solution]

I tried that. No luck. But I do have some good news. I spent about 16 hours searching the web, looking for any information I could find. I eventually found a post somewhere that mentioned that the Nvidia 500 series chipsets were unable to address more than 1.1GB and that there was no currently available way of getting around this. However, the post was from August 2008 and so I searched some more and I was VERY fortunate that I found a single post on a forum somewhere by a chap who had the same hard drive and motherboard as me and he had the same problem.

He mentioned that Windows Update did not actually download the most recent version of drivers for my chipset and that you needed to download and install the ones that were directly from the Nvidia website, NOT the Asus website (where Windows Update fetches them from). This, however, presented a new problem because the driver pack includes the Nvidia Forceware Network Access Manager which does NOT like Vista's Networking and Sharing Centre and causes all sorts of havoc with your network.The good news ? Installing the Nvidia FNAM (before you had no choice) is now optional when installing the driver pack so after installing the new chipset drivers I was able to access, format and make use of the FULL 1.5TB.

So the solution to this problem ( > 1TB HDD + Nvidia 500 Series chipset) is to get the correct chipset drivers and not let Microsoft balls it up with Windows Update.