Seagate Barracuda IV hd not working?

[Quixotic]

Motherboard: Abit KT7-Raid
Hard Drives: Seagate 40gb, Seagate 80gb

Okay, so I was dabbling with dual booting Debian Linux and Windows XP a few days ago. I had the entire 2nd drive (80gb) devoted to Linux and partitioned off 20gb of my first drive (40 gb total) for Windows and the rest for Linux. Both drives were connected to the Primary IDE controller (ATA 66), with my 2 cd drives on the Secondary IDE controller (ATA 66). After installing Linux, I proceeded with Windows XP. I installed that, activated it, did a little configuring and then tried getting back into Linux so I could edit the lilo.conf file. I tried booted off the floppy disk but it gave me an error message (something to do with the kernel or operating system, i forget). Frustrated, I decided to just wipe off my hard drives and install just Windows XP for now. So I booted from the Windows XP CD and deleted all the partitions off the 40gb drive and tried formatting the drive (NTFS). It took like 2 hours just to do 2% and then finally it returned an error message saying it could not format the drive. I hooked the drives back up to the ATA100/RAID controller and tried formatting it there but it still wouldn't work. So I downloaded a Seagate utility that let me do a zero filling format. I did that with the 40gb hard drive, rewrote the MBR, and then tried installing WinXP on it again. It worked this time, but I got tired of the long pause due to using the Raid controller so I switched it back to the ATA66 controller and it detected just fine. Then i went into the BIOS and disabled the RAID controller and rebooted the computer. After it posted, it wouldn't detect my hard drives and only found my cd drives on the secondary IDE. I switched the cables around, etc. but nothing worked. I turned the RAID controller back on and still nothing, but when I hooked the drives back up with the RAID controller, they detected fine. On the next reboot, my computer got stuck at the RAID BIOS setting screen and it hasn't gotten past that screen since then. I've tried moving it back to the ATA 66 controllers but the hard drives aren't detected. After playing with the different configurations, I've been able to get the drives to detect but usually on the next reboot, they go missing again. Does anyone know what is wrong? Oh, I also tried doing a low level format on the 80gb with the seagate utility somewhere in the mess of things, but it returned an error on that too.

I want to say my motherboard is malfunctioning because the drives are brand new.

 

[copyfixer]

Start from scratch. Take the drives out to a known good computer and set them as slaves to the good computers hard drive. Then reformat the drives. then reset the bios on the bad computer and restart from ground zero. Good luck

 

[Quixotic]

Yeah, I'm resetting the BIOS right now. My instincts tell me that my hard drives are fine... doesn't a zero fill format reset everything on the hard drive anyway?

 

[Quixotic]

Okay, the 80gb formatted in about 5 hours. That seems a litte slow to me. But so far I can boot off it... I just hope when I restart the computer, it will still work, because the last couple times I did that when using the 40gb as the boot drive, the drives weren't detected.

I disconnected the 80gb first and tried formatting the 40gb but it froze before it could format and when i rebooted, the drive went missing again. So I tried the 80gb instead and so far so good, though that 5 hour format doesn't really help my confidence in the drive (or motherboard). Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

 

[Quixotic]

Bump for help =(

 

[Quixotic]

No one? =(

 

[WarCon]

Go get the diagnostic software from Seagate and use it to diag both drives. It might be able to tell you whats up.

 

[ojai00]

<< Yeah, I'm resetting the BIOS right now. My instincts tell me that my hard drives are fine... doesn't a zero fill format reset everything on the hard drive anyway? >>



Zero filling erases everything on the drive and all the information that was stored on the drive by BIOS. It takes longer to do this, hence your 5 hours. Usually, Seagate's low-level format utility, which just does a quick erase of your hard drive takes about 5-10 minutes. I would go with Warcon's suggestion and get Seagate's diagnostic utility. You can run it off the CD that you get when you purchase the drive. I had a problem booting, so I zero-filled the drive, and I had to fiddle around with it because BIOS was only showing that I had 8GB of a 60GB drive. But everything is working now. Hope this helps.

 

[Quixotic]

It wasn't the zero fill that took 5 hours... it took 5 hours for me to format normally from a boot disk =(

 

[Quixotic]

Also, it won't let me zero fill the 40gb drive anymore... when i tried that, it just failed after zero filling 63 blocks and then when i restarted, both drives went misisng again...

 

[ojai00]

Hmm...might actually be that your hard drive is messed up. I think bad sectors are causing the formats to freeze. I tried formatting this drive at work that had some bad sectors...and it would format, then try to allocate a sector and repair it. That process took a really long time, and it looked like it froze, but it didnt. Try doing a low-level format using Seagates utility. The first time I zero-filled the drive at work, it froze also. Then I tried a low-level format, and then another zero-fill and finally got it working so that I could install Windows on it. Good luck dude...

 

[Quixotic]

thanks LOL... i never thought i could have so many problems with a brand new drive