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Hi all! I hope someone can help me with the problem I’m having.
I bought the WD3200AAKS Caviar Blue last year sometime and it has worked great for a long time with the cavaet that it was not always recognized by the BIOS. Restarting a few times always remedied the problem and once the computer was on, it STAYED on, with no problems to speak of. I have an APC, but I also have shoddy power and this week the power turned off and that was the last time that my drive was recognized by the BIOS.
Right now, I’m on a VISTA box and it continues to not be recognized by the BIOS or Windows. I want to say that the controller on the Mobo is going bad, but for the fact that once it’s recognized, there are no issues at all. In fact, restarts also don’t affect the drive’sbeing recognized, it’s only loss of power for any amount of time.
This drive never made a peep, or had any kind of erratic behaivour to suggest to me that it was going bad.
What I’ve tried:
Resetting the BIOS, changing and tring all of the BIOS options: i.e. changing between the RAID / IDE options.
Shorting all of the jumpers on the drives: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8.
Different SATA data (but not power) cables. You can feel the drive start and hear it spinning.
I fear that due to the nature of the BIOS, that I will have to drop some real cash to fix this problem. But I feel like I’ve properly exhausted all options that occur to me. Any ideas?
Some good tips - I used a new, but cheaper, powerstrip, with no change.
I also updated my BIOS, which also didn’t do anything to help.
I want to say that the power supply is an elegant solution, but not the correct one. Why?
Because when I plug in more components, dvd + hard drives, I don’t get similar problems.
When the probblem started, only the motherboard, two fans and the SATA drive were plugged in, and my USB hub has it’s own power supply.
I was thinking about getting one of those cheapo SATA PCI cards you mentioned. But how about this for a temporary solution: buy an external USB enclosure and run it from USB until I can get the cash together to buy a new PC?
I want to say that the power supply is an elegant solution, but not the correct one. Why?
Because when I plug in more components, dvd + hard drives, I don’t get similar problems.
When the probblem started, only the motherboard, two fans and the SATA drive were plugged in, and my USB hub has it’s own power supply.
I was thinking about getting one of those cheapo SATA PCI cards you mentioned. But how about this for a temporary solution: buy an external USB enclosure and run it from USB until I can get the cash together to buy a new PC?
My only thinking was that since this seems to be an older system, the power supply could be as much at fault as the drive itself. if there isn’t enough amps to power the drive, you may get erratic behavior from the drive, especially at spinup when it requires the most power.
But you are right. If all you’re using the drive for is backing up data, then a USB enclosure should work fine. Besides, this is all just troubleshooting to make sure that it isn’t the drive.
I obtained A Blue Caviar WD640 to replace a seagate 500GB @ system wouldn’t recognize unit & other times it would. I called retailer & sent unit bak. They told me they installed windows(?) with no problem & returned unit 2 me. I finally removed or HDD’s & was able 2 install XP Pro, would not allow Win 7, but once I reconnected other HDD’s the WD disappeared. I mounted in an external enclosure device & it was detected again with XP Installation. Put it bak in case & yep it disappeared again. I switched to new sata cables, bios (Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P) is up to date, tried resetting 2 default & optimization, pulled memory & reduced to 2gb have 8 installed, tried using other power cables from PWS. Nothing works. So in spking with Gigabyte tech, He mentioned that mine was not the first call about having difficulties with WD HDD’s. My only alternative is to return unit again & wait for a seagate which I know works cause I had a dual boot system until it died.
