Seagate 1TB HDD problem.

[vaibhav1608]

I have two HDDs
One is 1TB WB green edition for storage.
And i recently bought 1TB Seagate barracuda drive for the OS
All my data is in WD drive
So i connected the Seagate drive for installing Windows 8.
Initially BIOS recognized the drive as 136 GB .
So i disconnected my WD drive and booted up computer, this time BIOS recognized the Seagate drive as 1000GB. So i installed windows 8.1 without issues.
After installing the drivers and all shut down the PC and connected My WD drive and booted up. In the windows welcome screen pc shuddenly restarted and after that it booted up normall . Showing both drives.
When i booted up PC now, BIOS some times shows Seagate HDD as 1TB and sometimes as 136 GB. AND if at all i dont get Disk failure message, Windows goes to infinite "Preparing for automatic repair" mode.
What should i do?
This problem with Seagate HDD has happened second time. The first time I replaced the HDD.

My system specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955
MoBo: Gigabyte 990XA UD3
RAM: 4GB Corsair XMS3
Graphics card: XFX 6770 HD
HDD: 1TB WD GREEN EDITION AND 1TB SEGATE BARRACUDA

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there vaibhav1608,

I would advise you to start with swapping the cables as well as the SATA port. This way you will see whether it is some sort of connection issue.
If the issue persists, it may be a good idea to test the drive that is causing problems with a brand specific testing tool. If the results show any problems, then I guess you should contact the manufacturer's Support and eventually RMA the drive.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[vaibhav1608]

In BIOS it is showing as a 136 GB drive. And when I tried to boot it normally it goes to infinite "preparing for automatic repair" mode.
Earlier I had Seagate 250GB HDD as my OS drive and my system recognized it fine along with 1TB WD HDD.
Will updating BIOS could help??

 

[D_Know_WD]

After BIOS recognizes other drives correctly, maybe the issue is not caused by outdated BIOS. The different capacity size in BIOS, could indicate that there is something wrong with the drive as well.
After the system can't boot, you will need to attach the drive externally to another system(SATA to USB cable, or enclosure) and test it.
I guess it wont hurt to update BIOS as well.

D_Know_WD

 

[fzabkar]

@vaibhav1608, your Gigabyte BIOS appears to be the "Xpress Recovery" version. It writes a backup copy of itself to the end of the primary HDD and then hides the backup inside a HPA. Unfortunately there is a bug which sometimes reduces the capacity of the HDD by 1TB. The usual symptom is that a 1TB HDD is reduced to 32MB or so. I'm wondering whether your BIOS has a bug which reduces the HDD's capacity to 128GiB (= 137GB).

You could test whether a HPA has been enabled using tools such as HD Sentinel, CrystalDiskInfo or HDDScan.

GigaByte BIOS bug reduces 2TB capacity to 128GiB:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=150&p=2958

 

[vaibhav1608]

I have updated Gigabyte BIOS to latest version and still no cure.
Contacted Seagate tech support, they said it could because of firmware issues or bad sectors, basically they were telling me that drive is faulty. So will get it replaced.
@fzabkar will try it. Lets hope it works. This Seagate drive is giving me headache. I'm just thankful that its brand new and I dont have any data in it.