New harddrive crashes bootup.. sometimes.

[aznan]

Hi,
I have 2 SATA harddrives since before, but games nowadays take too much space, so I bought another one . A WD Caviar 500Gb. My Abit A8X motherboard has a SATA-1 controller, so I had some trouble getting the drive to register since it uses SATA-II, but after placing a jumper on the right pins I got it to work.

Now that it had been found I could go into Windows and format it, but once it got to 100% it disappeared. Even from bios. So I tampered with the connections a bit and simply switched places with the new drive and drive no two. Then thing worked fine. For a while. The third time I booted the computer with this new setup, bios wasn't able to get past the step where it's supposed to find the drives and instead blurted out some mysterious message about bios not being installed or something of the kind.

So I tampered some more with the connections. I switched back the drives so that the new one was on SATA port 3 and drive no two was on port 2. Same thing. I unplugged drive no two. Same thing. I switched the new one back to port 2, while no two was still disconnected. This time it worked.

I don't know where the problem may lie since different connections seem to work at random. Have you got any suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[JustaGeek]

Recently, someone here had some issues with a WD Drive, and was not able to get it to work.

I suspect a bad Hard Drive (again).

RMA, or replace it at a point of purchase.

 

[robisbell]

drive incompatibility with the old motherboard, and possible power issue.

 

[aznan]

I've now switched some cables to and fro and I've concluded that the problem occurs when I plug any harddrive into SATA port 3 or 4, so in the worst case controller 1 on the motherboard is broken.

In a last attempt to clutch at straws I ask if there could be anything else, like separate drivers/RAID-arrays on controller 0 and 1 or somesuch. If not, would a SATA PCI card be something to look into?

 

[robisbell]

I'd look into replacing the board. if you have failing sata ports, it's only a matter of time before something else fails.

 

[aznan]

Yeah, but I was planning on getting a new computer within a year anyway, so I just need something to glue it together with until then.

 

[robisbell]

okay, just be aware if the board fails, there is a chance you could lose the cpu, memory,video card.