A.N.Other said:
Sounds to me like it's dead tbh. Reading through all that, it sounds like you've tried basically everything.
You could get a small linux burnt to a CD/DVD and see if that recognises the HD. You might be able to recover some things with that, if it does. One of the
Slax distributions would do you nicely for that.
It can't be dead because it works fine for everything but installing windows from this sata controller...
theres no important data on it, and even if there was i can just boot from the other raptor or plug it into another system and get it off.
WJA96 said:
Were the 2 Raptors configured in RAID 0? If so, then have you enabled the RAID controller in the BIOS? If it's picking up the SATA drives then maybe it's not enabled in the BIOS and the system thinks it has a pair of unformatted HDD attached to it.
Good idea, but they weren't in raid.
Its a real pig this one. What it basically amounts to is one drive not letting me install windows when plugged into one specific sata controller. Everything else works fine. I've contacted the retailer and i'll send the board and harddisk back together if i have to. I'm also going to contact wd.
One thing that has occurred to me to try is the secondary sata controller on this board, because if the disk works on that i can definitely say its an issue with the primary sata controller not working with this disk, if it also doesn't work with the secondary sata controller that suggests its something else unique to this system.
When i've done this, then i can potentially send back the board and disk together providing it works with the secondary sata controller, because that would prove beyond all doubt its an incompatibility between this drive and this sata controller. And it will be their problem to decide which is at fault.
I've done something similar before with the same retailer so i expect they would allow me to do it.
Its just such a wierd problem though. It only occurs in an extremely specific circumstance, i.e with only with the combination of this sata controller, this exact harddisk, and installing windows. And the fact that another identical harddisk works fine is very wierd. Its a different firmware revision but thats the only difference i can see. Wd offer no firmware upgrades so i can't try that.
