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#627472 - 17/01/07 11:39 AM SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
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So, for the past year or so, I've had a Seagate 300GB SATA harddrive as a slave drive in my PC with a 160GB PATA drive as my master. (Asus A8V motherboard by the way)

Yesterday, without warning and for no apparent reason, my computer started acting odd. It would lock up for about a second, then allow for normal opperation for the next 5 then continuously repeat that cycle. I immediately thought I had a failing harddrive, but none of my drives were making any kind of noise.

I immediately thought it was my PATA because I've never had a single problem with my SATA drive. I couldn't log into Safe Mode, I couldn't get a command prompt, I couldn't do ANYTHING. I'm not sure why I did it, but I decided to unplug my SATA drive first to start the troubleshooting. Sure enough, the computer fired up and worked FLAWLESSLY.

I plugged in the SATA drive again. The VIA RAID divers/software found the drive and listed all of it's attributes. It took me about an hour to do the same thing through "My Computer", but when I finally got it to post in Windows, it showed 0 Bytes free and 0 Bytes total space.

Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I had all my music and downloaded files/software on that drive. Not to mention all my gaming files.

My question is this....am I screwed? Is my harddrive gone? Should I give up and just go buy a new one and start over? OR, is there a way to fix this? The drive itself doesn't make any odd clicking noises at all. I was told that the controller board on the harddrive itself may have gone bad and can be switched out. How difficult is it to do this? Is that a feasable option?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

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#627473 - 17/01/07 01:00 PM Re: SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
Unregistered


Quote:
Originally posted by Hawk:
So, for the past year or so, I've had a Seagate 300GB SATA harddrive as a slave drive in my PC with a 160GB PATA drive as my master. (Asus A8V motherboard by the way)

Yesterday, without warning and for no apparent reason, my computer started acting odd. It would lock up for about a second, then allow for normal opperation for the next 5 then continuously repeat that cycle. I immediately thought I had a failing harddrive, but none of my drives were making any kind of noise.

I immediately thought it was my PATA because I've never had a single problem with my SATA drive. I couldn't log into Safe Mode, I couldn't get a command prompt, I couldn't do ANYTHING. I'm not sure why I did it, but I decided to unplug my SATA drive first to start the troubleshooting. Sure enough, the computer fired up and worked FLAWLESSLY.

I plugged in the SATA drive again. The VIA RAID divers/software found the drive and listed all of it's attributes. It took me about an hour to do the same thing through "My Computer", but when I finally got it to post in Windows, it showed 0 Bytes free and 0 Bytes total space.

Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I had all my music and downloaded files/software on that drive. Not to mention all my gaming files.

My question is this....am I screwed? Is my harddrive gone? Should I give up and just go buy a new one and start over? OR, is there a way to fix this? The drive itself doesn't make any odd clicking noises at all. I was told that the controller board on the harddrive itself may have gone bad and can be switched out. How difficult is it to do this? Is that a feasable option?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
The first thing I would try is a disc diagnostic tool, from like western digital or maxtor's websites...

**** Use this info at your own risk ****

The drive's actuator could be stuck, you can try holding the drive upside-down and dropping it flat onto a counter to try to free it. (like 1ft should do it)

As a last resort, you can always freeze the drive for like 3 hours and plug it in and backup the drive as fast as you can (dying hdd's can actually work with less errors after being frozen)

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#627474 - 18/01/07 12:53 PM Re: SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
Unregistered


Ok....So, I used the SeaTools diagnostics and everything came back OK. The drive itself isn't making any noises like somethings locked up inside or anything similar. I'm thinking a SATA/RAID driver issue, but even with an updated driver, Windows still won't recognize it. I don't get it.....The SATA/RAID software finds and recognizes it, the BIOS finds it and recognizes it, but Windows itself won't find it and recognize it.....I'm totally lost on this one.....

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#627475 - 18/01/07 01:14 PM Re: SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
Unregistered


Quote:
Originally posted by Hawk:
Ok....So, I used the SeaTools diagnostics and everything came back OK. The drive itself isn't making any noises like somethings locked up inside or anything similar. I'm thinking a SATA/RAID driver issue, but even with an updated driver, Windows still won't recognize it. I don't get it.....The SATA/RAID software finds and recognizes it, the BIOS finds it and recognizes it, but Windows itself won't find it and recognize it.....I'm totally lost on this one.....
It doesn't show up in windows at all now? or does with no space?

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#627476 - 18/01/07 02:10 PM Re: SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
Unregistered


Been awhile since I messed with my drives but try this:

Go to My computer - right click -select manage - storage - disk management and initialize (BE CAREFUL WITH THIS AS IT MAY ACTUALLY FORMAT THE DRIVE, LIKE I SAID, BEEN AWHILE SINCE I DID THIS) it there.

I have 2 SATA's at home and I think that's what I needed to do to get the second one working. I'm at work right now and can't actually see the actual settings.

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#627477 - 21/01/07 10:32 PM Re: SATA drive issue....any ideas?
Anonymous
Unregistered


Alright....It ends up the MBR and the files system structure was corrupted. I downloaded and used KNOPPIX to recover the MBR and fix the file system structure, then upon reboot chkdsk worked out the rest of the kinks and it works GREAT again!

Quote:
KNOPPIX is a bootable Live system on CD or DVD, consisting of a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a productive Linux system for the desktop, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it (over 8GB on the DVD "Maxi" edition).
- taken from here

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