up vote 1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

So a friend of mine had a Seagate 7200.11 drive die on him (which, after investigating, is no surprise at all). He had backups so I told him to go get a new drive and I'd take care of the restoration.

He shows up with a 7200.12. I put it in the PC and the onboard SATA controller doesn't recognize it at all. I change ports from SATA0 to SATA1 and still nothing.

I throw it in the enclosure for his backup drive and plug it into my Macbook. The Macbook sees it right away and allows me to format it as FAT32. So the new drive is apparently good.

I plug his backup drive into the PC and the SATA card recognizes it. Windows Setup doesn't but that's another problem. I try putting the new drive in and switching the SATA from 'RAID' to 'IDE' to see if that helps, but no go.

The new drive seems good, but the desktop PC just won't read it.

Specs:

Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M motherboard using onboard RAID
Seagate 500gb 7200.12 (CC38 firmware)
link|improve this question
100% accept rate
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Have you run Seagate's drive tester tool on it? Have you checked any jumpers on the drive and verified they are set sanely? Have you checked your system's BIOS to make sure the SATA controller is enabled?

I don't think that drive actually has jumpers, but you should check if you haven't already.

I have an older system with a SATA-1 controller that won't recognize my Seagate SATA-2 drives right off the bat, but I haven't taken the time to figure out why. (They're the Green drives, not 7200.12's. They were installed into another system, so there wasn't a need to diagnose the issue.) Some Western Digital SATA-2 drives include jumpers to force SATA-1 mode, so my suspicion was that the Seagates don't fall back to SATA-1 correctly. SATA-2 is supposed to be backwards compatible, but it wouldn't be the first time a newer tech didn't make good on all its promises.

Is this your jumper pinout? Verify with the drive's label or manual and set that jumper if present:

enter image description here

link|improve this answer
I'll try running the tools on it. The drive does have a jumper block but no jumpers. I'll see if that makes any difference as well. SATA is enabled as the 7200.11 worked up until it died a horrible clicky death. – dragonmantank Jan 15 '10 at 14:22
1  
I had to set the jumpers. As a side note, Seagate is wrong when they say that the jumpers are disabled on these drives :) – dragonmantank Jan 19 '10 at 15:22
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.