Booting & new SATA drive

chisholm

Junior Member
Jun 17, 2005
3
0
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Seems like this sort of thing is posted a lot...:p But not exactly this problem (which probably also happens a lot...)

I have an Intel D875PBZ mobo, latest BIOS, flashed yesterday. I got a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA150 drive yesterday as well. My computer seems generally healthy. Nothing really wrong with it. There is a PATA ~47GB Deskstar already in it; it's master boot disk and only thing on its IDE channel. But if I plug in the SATA drive, it won't boot. It won't even try to boot, as far as I can tell. After POST, as it goes to detect the drives, the Maxtor makes these click-click-click-click noises and after I wait for about a minute, it tells me "Primary Master Hard Disk Error" and forces me into BIOS setup. It sounds like the disk head is banging around in there. The BIOS shows a "Maxtor SABRE" on SATA0, but has no details about it... Max Capacity is listed as zero, "LBA Mode", "Block Mode", all display as "Not Supported", although I am pretty darn sure this drive should work. As I was googling about this issue, I stumbled across a system sold by gamepc.com with a different mobo with the 875P chipset and this exact drive (was in google's cache... the systems on that site are updated now). I can't change the SATA drive's position in the boot priority list, because it doesn't show up as an option. The only drives there are the floppy, my CD/RW, and the Deskstar. Putting a bootable floppy in the floppy drive does nothing, nor does putting my bootable winXP CD in the CD drive. I tried changing the SATA cable... no difference. Disabling/enabling RAID in the BIOS makes no difference either. If I unplug the SATA drive, everything works great again.

Perhaps this clicking sound is a blindingly obvious sign of a dead drive, but I've never had a DOA drive before (guess I've been lucky), and was just looking for some feedback from the "experts" :)

Any advice is welcome!
 

chisholm

Junior Member
Jun 17, 2005
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Hadn't heard the term "click of death" before :) Thanks for the info. Guess it's time to RMA...
 

Carbo

Diamond Member
Aug 6, 2000
5,275
11
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Have you tried running Maxtor's disk utility to determine if the disk is defective or not? Go to their website, download the program, and give it a run. It should shed some light on the problem.
 

chisholm

Junior Member
Jun 17, 2005
3
0
0
I don't think that is possible. I can't boot anything. Which means I can't get to the point where I can run any sort of program.