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#1
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My latest problem driving me insane - SATA controller only recognizes ONE hard drive
Its got two connections.
The thing is ALL my PCs motherboards Ive bought the last few years seem to react really sluggishly to changes in hardware - often blanking out seeming to be dead - necessitating a clear CMOS routines etc or they act screwy. Its not like the old days where you get a immediate reponse good or bad and you just fix whatever is bad and it works rightaway. When I first setup the SATA drives the sata controller wouldnt work until I kept switching the hard drives and futzing with the connections ALL NIGHT. Then suddenly like magic it seemed to work. Since then its been rock solid with two hard drives. Then I set two drives in a RAID config - once again no problems. Then I recently bought some new HDs and unraided the config - since then its been flakey. It worked with some weirdness at first but then settled down again. Now its the craziest thing. It insists on not recognizing one hard drive. They show up on the boot up screen though once in a while theres corruption in the detection of one of the hard drives - instead of WD and maxtor itll show some weird ascII characters. But afte rebooting itll eventually settle down and detect them. Usually this happens when I change ANY of the cables, hard disks around on the sata set up. However WINXP PRO stubbornly refuses to show more than one hard disk. Heres the weird part, its not necessarily a particular HD or connection. But yet its sticky to some degree in regards to the HD. Ive swapped cables and the same HD will show no matter what connection or cable or converter I use. So that implies the HD is at fault. But then Ill start swapping HDs in and out - Ive got 4 of them I can use. Itll glob on to one of them and then recognize that one for a while so theres something there but it seems not to be any one HDs fault. Ive even tried a new intallation of WIN XP pro on another HD to see if there was something in the WIN XP installation. ive swapped PSes with a another 400 watter just to see if the Antec was weakening and taking all other cards and drives out and it still does it. Im going to try one more thing - reformat all the drives that are being detected since I kept them as they were when they were on the IDE connections. |
#2
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On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 05:01:00 GMT, "
wrote: Its got two connections. The thing is ALL my PCs motherboards Ive bought the last few years seem to react really sluggishly to changes in hardware - often blanking out seeming to be dead - necessitating a clear CMOS routines etc or they act screwy. In days gone by you'd mentioned a problem with humidity, has that been resolved or are there potential connector problems? Its not like the old days where you get a immediate reponse good or bad and you just fix whatever is bad and it works rightaway. When I first setup the SATA drives the sata controller wouldnt work until I kept switching the hard drives and futzing with the connections ALL NIGHT. Then suddenly like magic it seemed to work. A few boards have had their SATA though separate controller chip, (Silicon Image) and had that controller bios updated in a motherboard bios update. Is there any commonality to the controller or it's bios? Since then its been rock solid with two hard drives. Then I set two drives in a RAID config - once again no problems. Then I recently bought some new HDs and unraided the config - since then its been flakey. It worked with some weirdness at first but then settled down again. Now its the craziest thing. It insists on not recognizing one hard drive. They show up on the boot up screen though once in a while theres corruption in the detection of one of the hard drives - instead of WD and maxtor itll show some weird ascII characters. But afte rebooting itll eventually settle down and detect them. Usually this happens when I change ANY of the cables, hard disks around on the sata set up. I'd suspect the SATA connectors, the fragile connectors on PCs have always been a pet-peeve of mine but what can you do? If it were PATA I'd suspect jumper setting problems but obviously that can't be it. You're not overclocking ATM? However WINXP PRO stubbornly refuses to show more than one hard disk. Heres the weird part, its not necessarily a particular HD or connection. But yet its sticky to some degree in regards to the HD. If you had a spare SATA controller card, it might help to try it. Might also help to disable any other onboard features, remove other cards from system and see if that makes any difference. Are the boards running latest bios verison available? You might find some fellow users of same board(s) at web forums like http://forums.amdmb.com Ive swapped cables and the same HD will show no matter what connection or cable or converter I use. So that implies the HD is at fault. But then Ill start swapping HDs in and out - Ive got 4 of them I can use. Itll glob on to one of them and then recognize that one for a while so theres something there but it seems not to be any one HDs fault. Ive even tried a new intallation of WIN XP pro on another HD to see if there was something in the WIN XP installation. Are any or all larger than 128GB? Is it possible that only those larger are being "lost"? ive swapped PSes with a another 400 watter just to see if the Antec was weakening and taking all other cards and drives out and it still does it. Is the 12V or 5V rail drooping any, OR is the other one going up, for example a 12V rail of 11.8 and a 5V of 5.3V? Do the voltages change significantly when drives are added or removed? Im going to try one more thing - reformat all the drives that are being detected since I kept them as they were when they were on the IDE connections. So these drives are PATA but using a bridge to attach to the SATA controller now or vice-versa, or ??? |
#3
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On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:15:09 GMT, kony wrote:
On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 05:01:00 GMT, " wrote: Its got two connections. The thing is ALL my PCs motherboards Ive bought the last few years seem to react really sluggishly to changes in hardware - often blanking out seeming to be dead - necessitating a clear CMOS routines etc or they act screwy. In days gone by you'd mentioned a problem with humidity, has that been resolved or are there potential connector problems? HA - thats funny you hit it right on the head I think. Its freaking BIZARRE. Right after I posted I decided to clean the sata contacts as the last resort. If connectors are in contact how can the contact points keep getting corroded ???? The thing that confused me was there was a bewildering confluence of problems - video, sata etc It was hard sorting it all out. And the problems was intermittent. After wasting almost half a week taking it apart over and over and over and over , reformatting things etc about 10 min ago I decided to do another test swapping converters and sata cables and HDs to narrow it down and it seems like it was finally narrowing down to a CONVERTER problem. I thought maybe I messed something up cause the converters hang off the HD conection so they get bent a lot. For the heck of it I cleaned the contacts in it for the sata cable and ZAP - FINALLY all disks show up. Ive got to remember that all the time CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN everything. Heres another interesting thing ---- I constantly bring this up but this added to the confusion , there would be problems booting and detecting some of the HDs - the name of the HD would be corrupted. One of the zillions of times I was switching things around , I forgot to hook up the fan cables - I have them ALL connected to gether - the case fans and the harddisk fans. That was also bewildering - the motherboard was slightly erratic but the bios screen would detect BOTH maxtors on the sata controller but windows wouldnt detect the 2nd HD. I have the WD separate with the belly pan that has two micro fans in it so even without the fans its all alone so it doesnt get that hot. But the two maxtors I have in the 3.5 cage and the spacing is weird - it only allows 1/4 of an inch between them --- man did they get HOT. I mean HOTTTT !!!!! A bit hotter and I would burn my fingers. In fact there was the garbled ascii letters during initial detection by the motherboard. I immediately turned them off and plugged in the fans and they cooled down incredibly only feeling mildly warm. Im starting to think fans are a necessity for HDs not luxuries. Im probably going to drill some new holes to space the HDs more apart. |
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