Hard Drive Not Detected

Shiz · 24 Sep 2007 at 15:55

Hi all,

Formatted by 36gb Raptor so that I could RAID 0 it with a new one I bought from the MM.

Formatted fine and booted to windows all good (wanted some performance numbers to compare to RAID). Then I turned off, plugged in the 2nd drive and set the SATA 1+2 ports to RAID then rebooted. It then said it couldn't detect either drive.

Neither drive is showing up in the BIOS and when plugging into another machine they don't show up in windows.

I wiped the CMOS on the original PC but no joy, they still arn't being detected.

Anyone help with this?

rpstewart · 24 Sep 2007 at 15:57

What's the board in the original machine?

Are the drives plugged into the same ports as you set to RAID mode?

Are you seeing a RAID config utility prompt during the POST?

Shiz · 24 Sep 2007 at 16:12

The board in the original machine is a P6N-Diamond 680i from MSI.

Drivers are plugged into the RAID ports yes, unless the manual and board is printed wrong.

No I don't see the RAID config utility but this monitor takes ages to show anything (posting is finished by the time it powers up). The manual says F10 should bring up the utility but tapping that during post just means I have a long list of "reboot and select proper boot device".

Shiz · 24 Sep 2007 at 16:46

Ok I can get into the RAID utility but only one drive shows up, as "Config Drive", 16MB, yea MB. Both drives are 36.7gb... very confused now.

rpstewart · 24 Sep 2007 at 16:48

OK, just to be clear.

The HDDs are connected to ports SATA1 & SATA2, that's the two purple ports in front of the two red/black ones in the left hand column of SATA ports?

In the Integrated Peripherals >> OnChip ATA devices page in the BIOS you've got On-Chip SATA Controller Enabled and RAID mode set to RAID?

One other thing occurs to me while I'm typing this. Have you actually established that the new Raptor actually works? Might be worth setting things back to IDE mode instead of RAID mode and checking it's detected that way.

Shiz · 24 Sep 2007 at 17:02

Ok...

done some more testing.

When both drives are plugged into SATA 1 and 2 with RAID enabled on both of those, no RAID setup shows up.

If however, I plug one drive into the RED (SATA 6) I get the RAID setup and one drive shows up with 16mb as its size, and in the BIOS one drive shows up on SATA 6 that has a size of 8.4gb.

When in normal SATA mode, neither drive is detected by the BIOS in any port apart from SATA 6 in which they each show up as Config disk with 8.4gb capacity.

I am stumped here...

Edit: Just checked the BIOS version I have which is 1.2B (070307) whereas the latest on MSI's site is 1.2 (073107). Think it's worth updating?

rpstewart · 24 Sep 2007 at 17:43

The red and black ports are on a separate Silicon Image RAID controller so you can't RAID drives on one of those and one of the purple ones. I'd be tempted to avoid the SI ports totally since they seem to be semi hardwired on that board - you can have RAID0 or RAID1 and nothing else, the choice is determined by jumpers on the board.

Shiz · 24 Sep 2007 at 18:12

I tried 4 different drives that were all working this morning. None detected. And now none are being detected in other PCs... I am bricking it now. If they are dead I've lost so much info...

Edit: Ok, the only place any of the drives seem to work is when plugged into SATA 6 on the motherboard. They don't show up on any other PCs or any other SATA ports on the board. Has this thing killed my HDDs?