First SATA drive - not working

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 12:43:18AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> I recently had my /home/ hard drive crash and burn ... that will
> probably be the subject of another post.  The good news is that my
> backup regime worked (mostly).  So this question is about the new SATA
> drive I bought to replace it, but ... I've never dealt with SATA
> before.  I bought a 500Gb WD on College Street.  I have a Gigabyte
> motherboard with an Athlon 2700+ on it which has two SATA connectors.
> The drive will not register in the BIOS (or with the OS the one time I
> tried).
> 
> Steps I've tried:
> 
> - I've reseated the SATA cable at both ends (ad infinitum)
> - I've tried both SATA connectors
> - I've reseated the SATA drive power
> - the BIOS lets me select "IDE" or "RAID" mode for SATA, I've tried both.
> - the BIOS has three sets of two IDE drives, although only two PATA
> connectors: on the idea that the last of these are for the SATA drives
> (am I right?), I went in there and told it to auto-detect.  No joy,
> although it takes much longer to say "no drive" when this new one is
> connected.

Which motherboard is it?

You do NOT want IDE as the mode for SATA.

Gigabyte has a stupid tendancy of making you hit a function key in the
bios to get to advanced settings, and they generally don't like telling
you about it anywhere easy to find.

> - the drive is powering up and spinning, it can be heard and felt.
> - after the "press DEL to enter BIOS" message there's a SATA detection
> and "User mode" message: this has its own key, and I can enter it but
> do nothing because it detects no drives.
> - I have several computers, but all are older and none of the others
> have SATA to connect to.
> 
> It seems to me that there are several possibilities:
> - the drive is bad

Not that likely, but could be.

> - the cable is bad

Could be.  Try another one.

> - the mobo SATA is bad

Seems unlikely but could be.

> - the drive is larger than the mobo SATA chip can handle

The limit is LBA48 so not possible.

Most likely is a misconfigured bios or a bad cable.

> Do I return the drive?  Do I buy a PCI SATA card and cable to put in
> one of the other computers?  Do I whack the mobo or the drive with a
> hammer?  Suggestions are most welcome, as I'm thoroughly chumped (wait
> ... Is that "stumped" or "chumped?").

So far I have never had issues with SATA as long as I had the SATA
controller set to its native mode in the bios.  Would be nice to know
which chipset you have on that board.

Most decent computer stores should be able to at least if you bring the
drive back, plug it into a test machine of theirs to tell if they can
detect it or not.  And if their machine can't detect it either, then
they should just exchange it.

--
Len Sorensen
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