GA-Z87X-D3H MoBo running Windows 8 doesn't recognise secondary hard drives.

[Thelps]

Hi all,
My new Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H main board was working fine at first, before I installed Windows 8. The main board was recognising the 3 attached hard drives and CD drive fine.

However, during the Windows 8 install I noticed that the installer program was interpreting the 3 hard drives all as 'Drive 0' and simply naming them as different partitions (Drive 0 Partition 1, Drive 0 Partition 2, Drive 0 Partition 3). I proceeded with the install and noticed that only 'Drive 0' - my main drive - was formatted, as I would expect.

However, since then Windows does not recognise any other connected Drives except the CD Drive and the Drive on which it is installed. What's even MORE worrying is that now my Main Board's BIOS doesn't recognise the other 2 HDDs either, whereas before it was detecting them fine.

I have changed the BIOS' SATA mode from AHCI to IDE, at which point it DOES recognise the other drives, but then Windows BSODs when I try to boot up so I have to switch back to AHCI to get Windows to boot.

Any ideas as to what can be done to solve this?

 

[gokul36]

your MOBO has 4X4 SATA Pins..... 2 white 4 black and 2grey

2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0/1) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices
4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2 2/3/4/5) supporting up to 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices


3 x Marvell 88SE9172 chips:

4 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3 6/7/8/9) supporting up to 4 SATA 6Gb/s devices
2 x eSATA 6Gb/s connectors on the back panel, supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices

These SATA's are controlled by 2 Chipset .....One by Intel chipset and another my Marvell....

look into ur MOBO manual and connect ur HDD's in SATA 6Gb/s

 

[Thelps]

The manual only mentions 1 SATA controller - the Intel chipset.

I can only locate 6 SATA ports, all mounted together, directly on the 'MOBO'.

The hard drives were detected fine before I installed Windows 8.

You've given me some interesting information but I still have the same problem.

 

[Thelps]

I discovered the cause of the problem. It seems the GA-Z87-D3H has two BIOS modes. The '3D' mode and the 'Classic Mode'. Classic Mode can be selected from the menu on the middle-right side of the screen. A SATA port can be Enabled in the 3D mode, but if it isn't also Enabled in the 'Classic' BIOS then the port is still considered Disabled.

I solved the issue by enabling all my SATA ports in both '3D' and 'Classic' BIOS modes.