Hard Drive

[Nick5324]

I currently have two IDE HDDs, today I added a SATAII Seagate drive. The motherboard is an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2. It has two SATAI ports run off the southbridge, and one SATAII port run by a jmicron chip. I used the SATAII port. I started the computer, WinXP Pro found the drive no problem, and I went into Disk Management and formatted the new drive. When it finished, I checked in Windows Explorer to see if it showed up, which it did. I copied some files to it, no problem, deleted them, no problem.

I restarted the computer, and it has disappeared. Neither the BIOS or windows see the drive. In the BIOS, I changed the SATAII controller from "Auto" to "Enabled", but this didn't help. I shut off the computer and made sure neither the power or SATA cable had come loose, reset them just to be sure, all cables are fine. I took a look in device manager, it shows no driver problems.

I'm lost as to how this drive could show up just fine, be formatted, be accessible, but upon a restart, has disappeared. Anyone have any idea what the hell is going on?

 

[John]

Switch the drive to the SATA1 port, then set the jumper on the drive to 1.5G compatibility (if possible). If BIOS still doesn't see the drive try a different SATA cable and/or try the drive on a different computer.

 

[Nick5324]

Thanks John, I knew this would be the next thing to do, but I wanted to pick the brain of AT. I set the jumper on the drive to force 1.5G, connected it to one of the SATAI ports, fired it up. Windows detected the drive, and prompted me that the new hardware was installed, but I need to restart. I did, and the drive has reappeared. I did two more restarts, and the drive is still accessible.

I guess this proves that the problem is with the jmicron controller/SATAII port. However, it doesn't make sense that this wasn't a problem the first go around, but after a restart, no dice. It seems like it should either work or not work, not work once and then quit. Strange.