Gigabyte DS3 HDD issues, any ideas?

[welsh]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice. I have built a new PC and am experiencing some issues. Here is a breakdown of the components:-

E6300
2x512mb corsair value Ram
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Antec 430W PSU
Nvidia 7600 GT
250gb Maxtor Sabre 2 8mb buffer, Sata 2

I have used 3 hard drives and they have all failed on me. On is a new one sent through from Seagate.

Now in the BIOS I have tried a lot settings with the hard drive installed, would that have killed the drives?

For example
I have enabled SATA port 0-3 = enabled
Onboard SATA/IDE = enabled
Onboard SATA/IDE control mode = IDE

Things were running fine, but then I changed this to the control mode ACHI or RAID/IDE.

This seems to destroy the hard drives creating bad sectors etc. Is this normal, could this be a MB / RAM issue?

Any ideas ? thanks

Welsh

 

[Jizumonkey]

AHCI arranges data on your drive differently to normally and selecting this option after an install may very well destroy your data, I wouldnt think it'd ruin the drive to the point of an RMA though.

I have managed in the past to switch between the two but after I realised my drive didnt support AHCI I turned it back to IDE and got away with the whole thing Scott free. I've looked on the web briefly and i think that your drive also is not AHCI capable.

My current single sata drive settings are port0-3 = enabled, native = disabled (i.e works in legacy, but there seems to be no difference so I took the advice of the gigabyte tech support and left it at default) and control mode =IDE.

HD Tach is pretty much telling me that my drive is only slightly faster than expected due to the fact I've disabled my noise dampener feature that Maxtor annoyingly enable for some reason.

 

[welsh]

hmm, maybe selecting ACHI has done it then. Crap. All 3 hard drives started clicking over and over again every 2 seconds or so. I have run maxtor diags and seagate tools which say bad secotrs, heres your error code replace the HDD. I really didnt think that choosing the wrong controller would total the drives though :-( Would i be cheeky to ask for an RMA again ?

Thanks for sharing your settings, I thought a new MB or RAM something

 

[Jizumonkey]

Well I would check the drive first perhaps, put it in a friends PC as a slave drive and format it fully, then try it back in your own.

I'm not totally up on the concepts of AHCI but on wiki i found this:

* Enabling AHCI in a system BIOS will spawn a 0x7B BSoD STOP error on installations of Windows XP where AHCI/RAID drivers for that system's chipset are not installed. Switching to AHCI requires installing new drivers before changing BIOS settings. Some later versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2 include limited AHCI/SATA support
* When attempting to install Microsoft Windows XP or a previous version on an AHCI-enabled system will cause the setup to fail with the error message "set up could not detect hard disk drive...". This problem can only be corrected by using a floppy disk with the appropriate drivers.

So maybe resetting your BIOS, formatting your drive elsewhere, setting the drive properties as mine above and trying again is something you should think of doing before another RMA.

 

[Jizumonkey]

Oh, also dont try installing third party drivers etc option when installing windows as it's not necessary with a single sata drive.

 

[welsh]

ok cheers but after running seagate tools in DOS and trying to do a low level format it carashes and comes up with an error i assume the drive is now broken. i will try in mates PC

thanks again for your help