WD10EARS hangs bios, has no model number

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

So I put together an new machine and installed Windows 7 64.  Pulled my recently aquired WD10EARS drive from the old rig and put it in this one.  It was being used for data in a non-raid setup.  I have two partitions on it, it was setup in an XP environment without any jumpers.

I installed the OS on the new rig only hooking up a new drive (SSD), then attached other drives.  With the WD drive connected I could no longer access the bios page.  It just freezes when I hit “del” and I have to restart.  (I thought this was a motherboard issue and RMA’d it, thank you newegg!).  New one does the exact same thing.  Motherboard is ASUS M4A87TD EVO.

I can, however, boot ok into windows.  Win 7 recognizes the drive and I can use it normally.  Except that the model number cannot be read.  It shows up as [IDE].  WD Acronis won’t install because it can’t recognize that I have a WD product.  Lifeguard checks it out as OK.

I think these two things are related.  I’m running it now, figuring if I want/need to fiddle with the bios settings I will have to crack open the case and disconnect it.  Maybe I’ll shop for an external enclosure, but I really don’t want to do that.

Is there a solution for this or should I try to RMA the thing?

2

Hello,

does your BIOS recognize the drive? If you connect the drive to a different computer do you encounter the same issue?

3

Hi,

I guess the bios recognizes the drive since it works :smiley:

I can’t get into the bios settings to see what it recognizes it as, and the post screen goes by too fast for me to see it there.

I did have it in another computer for about a month with no worries there before moving it to the new machine.

4

OK, figured it out.  I’ll post in case anyone else has this problem.

This motherboard has the Asus Express Gate (“hybrid OS”) business.  You can install software on your hard drive and the “OS” is apparently stored in some ROM on the motherboard, allows you “instant on” and you can run a browser, email client, etc. from there without loading a real OS.

I didn’t install this stuff, but the board would still load the rom on boot-up.  This is apparently incompatible with my WD Green drive (only, Seagate works fine).

So, making sure my SATA was on AHCI and disabling the Express Gate seems to have solved the bios problem.

Drive still shows no model number though.