I suspect this may be an ASUS problem but I need to fix it.
I have a WD2001FASS WD caviar Black drive.
My operating systems is Windows 7 Professional 64bit.
The Motherboard is an ASUS P8P67 Pro. Bios version 1850 (latest). The board is less than a year old.
Anyway.
This is a long story … but to start with. I booted a Gnome3 distro disk (call me mad).
This then made a 250GB partition of its own (I think) without asking … cheers Gnome3.
So … as I use Acronis backup I though … no worries … I will just restore a backup.
WELL… guess what. I CAN’T.
I am still getting to the bottom of it … but I am 99% sure it’s this **bleep** UEFI Bios that ASUS has running on that board.
So why am I coming here ?
Well… simple … After the acronis true image 2012 Plus pack failed to restore the drive.
(It came up with "Failed to write data to the disk (failed to write to sector 412,937,723 of hard disk)
And after trying to get rid of the partition in windows using Diskpart with no luck, I Zeroed the disk.
Diskpart did succeed in getting it as unallocated space … (unlike disk manager in win7) but it would not let me delete it.
After zeroing the hard drive on a 32bit vista machine…(because I just was having no luck with the asus board) The ASUS mother board now no longer even recognizes the WD drive thought It works fine in Vista 32 …
I suppose the question really is …
How on earth do I really “low level format” the drive … Like the good old day … a REAL format …
I know the drive is fine …But my bloody motherboard won’t see it.
Or … is it the “ghost UEFI’s” causing all the trouble ?
Just another point.
The “so called Bios” on the ASUS board will NOT let me erase it properly.
What I mean by that is.
I have no drives attached to it at the moment (except the CD Rom) but it still has 4 …UEFI “windows boot managers” sitting in the boot priority screen in BIOS.
When I originally got the board it had one (I think) …
So … simple fix right ?
Apply the jumper to the CMOS … (even removed the battery this time) … wait a few mins … turn it back on…
Ghost UFEI’s STILL THERE !!!.. the time and date are wrong (as expected) but they are still alive.
Bugga…
Ok… time to get nasty I thought … is there a more recent BIOS available …
As luck would have it … yes there was…(the current one) …
Ok… flash it … and begone foul devil …that will overwrite everything and get my drive recognized again.
NOPE …
AND … the bloody ghost UEFI’s are still there in BIOS … with NO drives attached.
Is there no way to kill this zombie board from **bleep** !!!
I am going to post this is the ASUS forum as well…
I also have a ticket open at acronis … so I will update them with my progress too
There must be a way to get the MB to play nice again.
I am running out of ideas.
Rant … over… for now.
