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Only yesterday I bought two new 2GB Seagate drives and set them up as raid and installed lubuntu. It was working fine and there was no problem but today I made the very bad decision of swapping over the sata cables and connecting them to different sata ports and this seem to have made them undetectable to particularly any system.

I understand that once drives have been configured as Raid they don't show up in the Bios as Sata drives.

So on the linux system I set up yesterday they do not show up in the bios. I tried resetting the bios to factory settings, removing the battery, etc... I tried using the boot flash drive I used to install lubuntu. I get an error there is no file system to mount it and I only managed to boot like that once. The drives did not show up like that either once lubuntu was running.

Now I took the drives out and put them in a windows 7 machine. They do not show up in windows and do not show up in the other machine's bios either so I cannot reformat them.

Is there anything I can do?

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  • Obvious question... what happens when you swap the cables back? Jun 30, 2015 at 19:50
  • I did and it still can't see them
    – steven35
    Jun 30, 2015 at 19:56
  • I also swapped the sata power connectors if that helps
    – steven35
    Jun 30, 2015 at 19:58
  • How are the drives configured? Very much NOT as RAID in the BIOS and as mdadm RAID in software? (mdadm uses regular drives to build a RAID array). Or as Intel fake RAID (dm, not to be confused with the previous RAID which is md) ?
    – Hennes
    Jun 30, 2015 at 22:13

1 Answer 1

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They should show up in BIOS, even if configured as RAID. Something has to be able to see them, right?

Since they don't show in BIOS, on both computers, there must be either something wrong with the drives, something wrong with the cables, something wrong with the ports/motherboard (x2), or a BIOS setting issue (x2). An issue with the drives is definitely the most likely.

UPDATE
So your goal is just to get them working again. That's good since returning them under warranty is a possibility.

It's possible you could have a BIOS setting in both computers that causes this. You can try it in a third computer (that preferably never used RAID), or probably best - use a USB dock or enclosure of some kind. That will rule out the BIOS setting possibility if they still don't appear. Having them appear in BIOS (or via USB) is the first step. If that's not achievable, there is something wrong with the drives.

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  • I don't mind losing the data, just want to be able to use the drives. If it was only one drive I would say it's faulty but I bought two and only installed them yesterday
    – steven35
    Jun 30, 2015 at 21:21
  • Ok thanks. Updated. Did you try different cables already? Jun 30, 2015 at 21:29
  • So I tried different cables and different machines with various bioses and operating systems. I also tried an external usb adapter and they wouldn't work. One was giving a weird noise like it couldn't get the rpm up. I sent them back. +1 for the idea of trying external usb
    – steven35
    Jul 1, 2015 at 9:04
  • Ok, well I'm glad you got a resolution at least. It is odd that both had problems, but it's not unheard of. I thought about asking if you heard any interesting sounds, but that wouldn't have been definitive.
    – mikato
    Jul 1, 2015 at 14:31

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