Problems with SATA hard drive

Shepppard

Distinguished
Dec 19, 2005
6
0
18,510
ok in my system I had a 160 GB IDE hitachi hard drive wich I got out of an old e-mashine of mine and it recently went to poop. I was playing wow and then I restarted my computer and then everything messed up and the hard drive was clicking.

So I figuered I would try a system roll back to a week ago and then windows stopped booting. So I decided to get a new hard drive going to a 200 GB SATA maxtor hard drive. so I installed it with what I thought where the most updated drivers off the net but apparantly the writing on the mother board doesnt specify it to be a ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe. so I put the A7N8X Deluxe SATA drivers onto my system and tried to format it using a quick format using NTSC and it would jump to 20% and then too 100% and then say that it cannot format the drive...

So I rebooted and tried again with a slow format after deleting the old partition of course and which then took a good hour and then went to the same blue screen saying it cannot format the hard drive...

I then realized it was the wrong drivers... downloaded the new up to date drivers for my A7N8X-E Deluxe SATA drivers... installed it... deleted partition... quick NTSC format... and the same screen... tried it again deleting partition, and then a normal format, and the same thing....

So in a last ditch effort I went into my computer and took out all the periferals such as my sound card and IDE raid controler... leaving in only the ram, video card, and other essencials... and it still dint work...

Now I know it could be something wrong with the drive but I'm thinking my luck cant suck that much to have two messed up drives...

if there is something I'm overlooking here... PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HELP ME!!! before I put the computer out the window... very frustrating

thanks for your time guys
 

riksta

Distinguished
Mar 30, 2005
42
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18,530
Did you install a RAID driver for the new hard drive ?? SATA drives in Windows XP (and probably earlier Windows) need a third party RAID driver B4 Windows will even bother to look at the drive. You must have an installation CD with MAXBlast or some crap. Anyway, ignore my jibberish and go to this link.....

http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentation/installation_guides/ata_installation_guide.pdf

This tells you how to format Maxtor SATA drives in all Windows from 98 up.
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
You're lucky on this one. Most systems don't need a special driver for SATA drives, but his does only because his SATA controller is non-native (ie, his is a separate PCI controller chip soldered to the motherboard).

And he should have the controller set to non-RAID mode, using the non-RAID driver for his controller.