new sata drive blues

[supergreen]

Hi I recently updated my system, replaced pretty much everything besides the dvd burner and case, I’ve never dealt with SATA drives before and I’m having some trouble with a Seagate Barracuda 250gb HD

Here’s whats going on:


-Bios detects the drive fine.

-Windows XP SP2 disk will not recognize the drive when doing a fresh install.

- When I reattached my old ide hard drive, the already installed version of windows xp will not detect the drive and takes a very long time to load while the sata drive is still connected. I shut off the computer and switched the drive from the sata 0 to sata 1 port, also used a new cable, when I restarted windows I got a message that a new drive was detected. It showed up in disk management only to disappear about 30 seconds later. It did not show up on subsequent restarts.

-A disk wizard boot disk will only see the drive in safe mode, and its initial scan was detecting bad sectors and going very slowly(I gave up after it had been running for 24+ hours)

-SeaTools DOS will not recognize the drive if AHCI is enabled. If AHCI is disabled it will recognize the drive but it is was much much slower to actually load seatools (about 20 minutes versus less then 1 with AHCI enabled) I just started a short scan before I left.


My system:
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200
2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 memory
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB
Geforce 8600 gt
OCZ600SXS 600W power supply

 

[godless]

there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. windows xp simply doesn't have the sata driver already built in. that's why you can't install it so easily. only vista does. don't be worried. you can fix this in 3 ways.

first you can go into the bios, and change the mode that the hard drive is in. from ahci to ide. this will fix it. you will be able to install the windows on the hard drive and everything will be okay. you won't have some extra features which are only available in sata mode.

second, when you are installing windows it asks you for some extra drivers in the begining. now if you have a floppy drive you can install the drivers (obtained from gigabyte website for this mobo) for your mobo at this point and everything will be ok. if you have no floppy look at the next posssiblity.

three, if you do want to have it with sata mode, and you have no foppy, you will have to create your own disk with sata drivers already built in. you can do this easily using a program called nlite. you just will need to find the sata driver for your motherboard from the official website of gigabyte.

now i did hear someone installing it in ide mode, then somehow installing drivers,, rebooting, switching to ahci mode and everything working fine. i personally have never done this and don't know how to do it. if you want to do some extra reseaerch go ahead, but do post the link in this thread.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I'm not so sure there isn't something wrong with the drive. The extremely long delays and inability to see or intermittently see the drive indicate to me that there may be something wrong with the drive.

Were you able to get SeaTools to run and do a quick diagnostic on the drive?

 

[supergreen]

Thanks for the replies, I don't think ahci is the problem, I've already had turned it off in the bios, I had already read it was a no go with my motherboard and XP.
I started the Seatools short diagnostic and it got to 10% completed after 10 mintues and hung there for the next 9 hours.