WD Reds fail to IDENTIFY at boot

I have 2 Reds. Sometimes one fails, sometimes the other, some - rare - times both. Other times they both work.

My hardware:

* Asus M2nPV-VM motherboard
* BIOS version 5005 (this was the last version ever released)
* Phenom II X4 910e CPU
* 8GiB DDR2 RAM (dual-channel 800MHz)
* 4 SATA drives:
** 2 Toshiba DTACA100 (ports SATA1 and 3)
** 2 WD Reds WD10EFRX (ports SATA2 and 4)
* ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5450 on a PCIe slot

The symptoms:

* the BIOS will show a drive’s data as Cylinder: 4095, Head: 240, Landing Zone: 65534, Sector 255

* the sector count will be 268435455 instead of 1953525168

* LBA instead of LBA48

What i’ve tried:

* switching cables and ports

* activating large drive in the BIOS (for 4KiB isntead of the 512 emulation) and other BIOS toggles

* activating PUIS on one of the drives to troubleshoot a possible PSU spike on boot or something

I’m out of ideas, haven’t gotten any useful suggestions from WD support. The Toshibas have never failed to boot.

Has anyone seen this before? Any idea what’s going on? ny hint would be appreciated.

Do you have another PC to try these drives on, perhaps with a different motherboard, at least a different BIOS? I only say this because I have seen BIOS versions introduce bugs.

@vesperto, a sector count of 268435455 (= 0xFFFFFFF) corresponds to the 28-bit LBA limit and reflects a capacity of 128GiB (= 137GB).

I have seen a BIOS bug in both Asus and Gigabyte motherboards where the capacity of the HDD is reduced and incorrectly recalculated after a backup copy of the BIOS is written to the end of the drive.

GigaByte BIOS bug reduces 2TB capacity to 128GiB:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=150&p=2958
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_Capacity_FAQ.html

The BIOS usually targets the first HDD in the boot order. Also, a drive needs to support the HPA feature set before the BIOS can use it. Perhaps the Toshiba drives remain unaffected because of either of these two reasons.

Thank you for your replies.

This is the last BIOS Asus ever released for this motherboard, so i’m out of luck. I do have other motherboards laying around, but they’re mostly leftovers. I could use them for testing (which is inacurate since the disks only fail sometimes), but that wouldn’t do me much good.

I would assume linux would get around the BIOS as soon as it can access the drives (and re-accessing them does fix the issue), i guess it relies on the BIOS for the initial “jumpstart”.

If the BIOS is the culprit, which seems likely, i guess my chances are either a new motherboard (which sooner or later would mean new everything-on-thee-mb) or just sell the 2 Reds, get another Toshiba and go for a 2TB mdadm RAID5 instead of a 1TB Toshiba RAID1 and a 1TB Red ZFS mirror.

In the meantime i guess i can make do with a scipt that counts how many drives were detected at boot, but it’s a hack i’d rather avoid in the long run.

Thank you for your input, guys.

Cheers