Hello!
First I must say that I didn’t know WDC had a support forum, and if I’d known this earlier it would probably have saved me quite a lot of trial and error over the past years. Oh well, better late than never
Alright, here’s the deal:
My 750gb Blacks (got 3 in total) have been running for a little more than a year now on my HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 controller. But recently I’ve been updating my server, and the 750gb’s had to get demoted down to the onboard ICH controller on the Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard. This however, caused a few problems. One of the drives didn’t get recognized by my BIOS (updated version BTW).
Inside the BIOS itself it detected that something was connected to the desired SATA-port, but it could tell what. It only said “Hard Disk 0gb” or something similar. Inside Windows 7 x64 nothing appeared under diskmgmt.
So I thought I’d try the drive in my other computer, which also happens to be running with an Asus motherboard, Maximus Formula in this case, with a ICH9 SATA-controller. However, this gave me the exact same results as the first computer.
So then I figured I’d try out the Lifeguard Diagnostics tool from WDC, and I booted up into it, only to receive an error about a file not being in the right place. When I double-checked the DVD which I’d burned the .iso to, to check that the files were installed properly, everything looked alright.
Then I decided to try the Windows installation version of Lifeguard, and that one didn’t pick up the disk either.
So, then I reconnected the drive to my HighPoint RocketRAID 2320-controller, and once again, the drive popper up, and everything looked fine. CHKDSK gave me 0 bad sectors as well as HDTune. I also tried the disk on my HighPoint RocketRAID 1740-controller, only to receive the same result I got from the 2320-version. Now the Lifeguard utility did pick up the drive, but I got an error when running the test, though, I received the same error when I tried to run the test on any drive that wasn’t connected to the onboard-controller. It said something about “no sectors to read”.
To sum it all up:
- The drive does NOT work when plugged into any of my Asus MB’s
- The drive DOES work when plugged into ANY of my HighPoint RocketRAID-controllers
- BIOS on both computers + RAID-controllers (onboard and external) is up2date
- WDC Lifeguard was not able to pick up any information about the drive when connected to any MB
NOTE: My two other IDENTICAL drives (even from the same batch) are working PERFECTLY fine on ALL controllers, including both of my MB’s. Also, all 3 drives have previously worked together with the onboard-controllers.
Thanks in advance, I’ve sent an RMA request back to my store, and it did get approved, however, I wouldn’t mind finding a solution for this.
//hab