Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Won't Detect Hard Drives

closeratio · 6 Nov 2009 at 21:13

Ok so to try to sum up my situation in as few words as possible, I've got (or had) a good working PC which I built just over 2 years ago with help from all you helpful people on these forums (being 2 years old it's got a 2 year old spec, 8800GT, E2180 OC'd to 3.5 etc).

Anyway I've recently been running out of space on my second (out of two) hard drives which I keep all the films, pics and documents on (the programs go on the main drive). So I decided I'd get a new one, and move everything off the second drive onto the new one.

My setup now is (which isn't working):

1 x 500gig Western Digital Drive (SATA), been in the comp since it was built, has all the programs on it, never had a problem
1 x 160gig Seagate Drive (IDE), again, been in the comp since it was built (and was in another before that), never had a problem with that either
1 x new 1.5Tb Western Digital Green (SATA), this is where the problems started.

I turn off the comp, plug everything out, and plug in the new drive. Start it up again, I get a drive boot failure (it can't find my boot drive... even though I never moved its location)... so I go into the BIOS and it seems like it's not detecting the new drive... but the old one's still showing up.

So I mess around a bit more, plugging in and unplugging various other things, and I eventually find out, that if I only have the 1.5Tb drive in, it detects it, but it seems to think it's only a 500gig drive. Odd. So after that I spent about half an hour plugging more stuff in and out, trying different slots, to no avail. And that's where I am now.

If it helps, I've got a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R board, and as well as the three HDDs (two SATA, one IDE), and two SATA DVD writers plugged into the board as well.

The confusing thing is that I have 8 SATA ports, but only 2 of them are SATAII and the rest are SATA I. As well as this, the mobo manual isn't exactly clear as to what should be plugged into where, and more specifically what it should show up as on the big list of HDDs in the BIOS (which the two DVD writers show up in as well, being SATA).

Anyone got any ideas? Let me know if you need any more info.

Edit: Sorry I should say that all the SATA ports on the mobo are SATAII and are backwards compatible with SATA I (even though both my SATA HDDs, afaik, are SATA II anyway), the only reason I said what I did previously was because two of the ports are pink... which is apparently because they're controlled by a Gigabyte controller rather than the normal Intel ICH9R controller.

psd99 · 6 Nov 2009 at 21:33

this might sound simple but here are some of my thoughts

1. plug in your sata cable into each slot on board.

2. does the drive u want working actually power on? feel it for spins

3. try different sata cables

last point about one of the drives not being seen as the right size
there should be a setting in the bios
SATA configuration there are 3 options for it

ACPI
IDE
RAID

try all three of these if you haven't already and let us know if there is a difference.

If none of the above works - can you get a hard drive that you KNOW is working and try it out?

goood luck

closeratio · 6 Nov 2009 at 21:46

Thanks for your reply psd.

Whilst I was checking again to see if everything was plugged in as it should be, I noticed that the power cable for the original 500gig drive wasn't all the way in. Now it's all the way in, it's detecting it, and the actual like name thing that it's showing was different to the 500gig drive that was being shown before, meaning that it does think that the 1.5tb drive is a 500gig one.

I'm going to try the things that psd suggested in a mo, but if I manage to get it to boot into windows, I did download a program a week or so ago for this very occasion, as I had heard that some Gigabyte boards don't like hard drives that are 1tb or larger.

I had a go at flashing the BIOS to the latest version too, but it seems I needed to uncompress the file that I downloaded from the Gigabyte site first. I'll post another reply with m progress when I get the chance.

closeratio · 6 Nov 2009 at 21:59

Ok it's mostly been solved now, partly thanks to psd. Now I've got everything plugged in properly, it's finding all the discs, and it boots into windows now. Only problem Ive got is with the new 1.5Tb being detected as 500gigs, but I'm going to solve that now.

If this program I downloaded doesn't work (after I've formatted the Disk first ofc), I'll have a go at changing those things psd suggested. Hopefully I won't have to dive into the BIOS again though, as after I updated it I lost all my OC settings, which wasn't a big deal, but it does mean I'm gonna have to Orthos it all again just to make sure it's running as it should be.

closeratio · 6 Nov 2009 at 22:17

Ok all solved now. To summarise, for anyone else who might have this problem in the future:

~ The reason one of the HDDs wasn't showing up was because I didn't have the power for it plugged in all the way.
~ The reason it was only detecting 500gigs for the 1.5Tb drive is apparently because Gigabyte P35 boards (and perhaps other Gigabyte boards with different chipsets, I'm not sure) have issues with drives of 1Tb and over. I used this program to restore the disk to its original size, and it works fine now.

psd99 · 6 Nov 2009 at 22:37

good news well done

zpos · 7 Nov 2009 at 06:01

closeratio said:
Ok all solved now. To summarise, for anyone else who might have this problem in the future:

~ The reason one of the HDDs wasn't showing up was because I didn't have the power for it plugged in all the way.
~ The reason it was only detecting 500gigs for the 1.5Tb drive is apparently because Gigabyte P35 boards (and perhaps other Gigabyte boards with different chipsets, I'm not sure) have issues with drives of 1Tb and over. I used this program to restore the disk to its original size, and it works fine now.

Thanks for taking the time to write up how you finally resolved the issue. I'm sure it will come in handy for someone else in future.