In for a penny

[Niall]

Well I've swapped the drive to another channel now and no joy. A new power connector shall be tried now.

Everything is working as I've just connected the USB2 cable, so those ports are working, the SATA1 and 5 are working, so I doubt that only 2 and 4 aren't working. Duff cable or erm...I dunno. I've swapped the drives down the power cable too. Now in position 1 & 2 rather than 2 & 3, so thinking about it, the drive is definitely powered. I'll have a nose in the bios to see if there's a cable select option.

[Niall]

Nope, changed channel to one previously used by the icy box that I know definitely works and nothing. Changed sata cable and nothing there either. The system just isn't detecting the drive at all. The one final thing I can think of is to separately connect another power rail to the drive, but that shouldn't be a problem. There's only the main drive and the dvd drive on the channel. Even the icybox has it's own power rail.

This is annoying me immensely.

[Niall]

Now tried every channel, every cable I had, and have with the new system. NOTHING is detecting this drive.

Also, Windows performance thing is coming up with an error stating there's an issue with the main hdd so it can't assess it.

What the hell can the problem be? I'm assuming it's motherboard related, but I can't see what. All is set correctly in the bios. IDE for ports 1-4 and ports 5&6 can ONLY be IDE. As the drives are SATA I'm assuming that as the main drive is working on an auto detect that IDE is correct. I believe the other options RAID (obviously dont want this set) and the third option, which I forget the name of, is for SSD drives.

So now I've got a drive that windows isn't seeing properly but is running on, and another drive with 2 years of data on it that I desperately need that can't be seen on any channel at all.

[pctech]

Get as drive swap? Does it spin up?

[Niall]

I've just noticed a click of death sound. I'm assuming (hoping) this is the backup drive being dead, not the main drive dying too. I've just bought a 500gb internal and 500gb external drive.

Next payday I shall buy another case, put all my old components in that with a new drive and see if I can recover anything on that. It doesn't look good though. I've got this nagging feeling that the main drive is about to die, which is why windows can't do the system test on it.

[pctech]

The click of death has come from your existing drive or the new one?

If the new one get it replaced before they wriggle out of it.

[Glenn]

Niall, you are not alone

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/12806-63-asus-m4a89gtd-usb3-doesn-recognize-sata-hardrive

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic323007.html

[Niall]

The click of death has come from your existing drive or the new one?

If the new one get it replaced before they wriggle out of it.

No, the drives are both old. The backup one was originally my main one. Every 6 months to a year or so I'll buy a new main drive, swapping the older one to backup status. I used to have two backup drives but with the size of my graphics card I can't fit the second drive bay into my full tower. I really need a better case, which I'll get at some point this year.

I hadn't actually upgraded for a lot longer this time (nearly 2 years) as I've been skint for ages. I am this month after buying all this PC kit!

[Niall]

Niall, you are not alone

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/12806-63-asus-m4a89gtd-usb3-doesn-recognize-sata-hardrive

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic323007.html

That's really odd. I spent literally two days searching for info on this, and never found either of these!

Why on earth would a motherboard not see anything other than the SATA1 port? This is what I'm seeing too, although I'm using SATA5&6 for DVD drive and esata ports on my icybox, with no problems (also tried disconnecting all that in case that helped, but no.

[Glenn]

Is there anything on the Asus forums?

[Niall]

Nope. Although:


I FIXED IT!

I was wondering if it was something to do with it supporting SSD/RAID etc. Then I started wondering about transfer rates as I had an old vague memory of my old Abit motheboard having a similar issue about 9 years ago (what happened to them?). You had to manually set the transfer rates in one of their pro boards. So I googled for a bit and found nothing, and thought I'd give it a go anyway. I changed the transfer rate to 3gb p/sec from 6gb and voilà, on reboot the system wouldn't boot at all! Progress!

Into the boot menu I toddled, and sitting there were two drives. Apparently the 6gb sata1 channel is priority, so I swapped them around in bios and a working system I have. Apparently, the clicking I heard wasn't the click of death, it was the drive briefly starting up, seeing that it wouldn't work at that rate and powering down.

Still, this experience means that I am not risking this again and I'm keeping the two drives I've ordered. I'll be backing them up, and I'll see if I can get my mum to buy a case this month so I'll build my redundant system sooner rather than later Incidentally, I've just moved my old laptop bag and a copy of XP professional I didn't know I had fell out

[Glenn]

 

[pctech]

Abit are still around Niall http://www.abit.com.tw/

[Niall]

Blimey, I can't remember the last time I saw a motherboard from them, or anything else for that matter.

[Glenn]

Have they re-started making motherboards then?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/08/28/1838236/Abit-To-Bow-Out-of-Mainboard-Market

[pctech]

Looks to be old info.

[Glenn]

Try buying a 2010 or 2011 Abit motherboard though.  

http://www.reghardware.com/2006/01/26/usi_buys_abit/

http://www.techeye.net/hardware/usi-kisses-goodbye-to-motherboards