Drives Not Recognised By BIOS

[sechs]

I bought a couple of Samsung 1TB F3s, and want to test them before using them in my NAS. They're not recognised by my BIOS. I'm 99% sure that the drives are simply DOA, as the packaging was highly inappropriate, but I want to be double sure that there's no funky incompatibilities that I don't know about.

The SATA comes off the nVidia 2200 chip on the motherboard; this is basically an nForce4.

If I jumper 3 and 4, or set no jumper at all, the POST hangs at ATA device recognition. If I jumper 1 and 2, which should force to 1.5Mb/s interface speed, the drives simply aren't recognised, and boot otherwise proceeds normally.

Any thoughts before I go ape doodoo on some poor, unsuspecting phone rep?

 

[ddrueding]

Nope. Ape doodoo away.

 

[Chewy509]

I've heard rumors of Samsung drives in general not liking nForce controllers, and using the Samsung utility software corrects the issue...

eg http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1298857

But since I tend to only have Seagate drives at the moment, I can't help with specifics.

 

[Mercutio]

That's not normal behavior for any drive.

 

[Will Rickards]

has this machine had 1TB or greater drives hooked up in the past? Might it be a bios limitation?

 

[sechs]

I've heard rumors of Samsung drives in general not liking nForce controllers, and using the Samsung utility software corrects the issue...

Problem: estool doesn't recognise the drives either.

 

[sechs]

has this machine had 1TB or greater drives hooked up in the past? Might it be a bios limitation?

No, I have not attempted to use a 1TB drive on this machine before, but I don't see any complaints of such problems for my motherboard online.

It's a workstation board, so I think people would have been pretty peeved if there was a generic problem with large drives.

 

[Mercutio]

SATA by itself does not impose drive geometry limitations, to the best of my ability to research.

 

[Will Rickards]

I just remember having to update this bios to support 1TB drives.
See the F7 bios revision here:
http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard/BIOS_Model.aspx?ProductID=2534#anchor_os

 

[sechs]

So, apparently, someone in the warehouse at this place doesn't know anything about packing drives, and they've been having problems. They sent me some replacements and are paying to ship back the baddies.

The replacements actually weren't packed much better, but, perhaps just well enough. They aren't recognised by my BIOS either; but, they do not cause it to hang (irrelevant of the jumper settings). However, since these drives do things that the bad ones didn't (like spin up or not make thonking noises, if they do) I decided to go ahead and put them in to my NAS blind. So far, no problems initialising and syncing the first replacement.

I'm not sure what the problem is with my computer. I have the latest (and last) BIOS flashed, and, no one appears to have piped up with any particular compatibility issues with large drives (although there's obviously something going on).

 

[LunarMist]

So, apparently, someone in the warehouse at this place doesn't know anything about packing drives, and they've been having problems.

Neweggs?

 

[sechs]

Ma Labs aka ewiz aka Superbiiz

Sadly, Newegg has a leg-up on these guys in harddrive packing. I don't usually order from these guys because they're local, and, yet, I can't pick up orders. However, they offered free shipping and a coupon that largely negated tax on the drives.

The good news is that the drives are all in, synced, and expanded with no errors. Not even a bad sector. I see evidence of spotty compatibility between Samsung and nForce controllers in the past, so, I have to chalk this up to that. This is unfortunate, as these drives seem so cool, quiet, and fast, that I'd consider replacing the local storage in my computer with the 500GB version -- but don't have faith that it'd work.