Seagate 7200.11 ST3320613AS failure

Hi,

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST3320613AS) SATA II 320GB hard disk drive. I disconnected an older drive I had installed to temporary connect the new one, configure it, break it in 2 partitions and then format both partitions in NTFS as primary, all this until I search for my spare SATA cable I had somewhere stored. Everything seemed OK at the time, the disk was detected correctly and all fore mentioned tasks completed successfully.

The day after, when I finally found the spare cable, is when the problems started. I reconnect the older drive back to where it was and the new one to an available SATA connector. I start up my computer and boot up Windows and... everything is as usual, I mean exactly as they supposed to be... before I installed the new hard drive. Windows Explorer would not see any new partition (although previously I had formatted and - in a later stage - asigned drive letters successfully). Disk Management could not even detect the physical disk. Third-party partitioning tools could not detect it either but I managed to detect it with SeaTools for Windows & HD Tune. I run some diagnostics which all failed except S.M.A.R.T. check. I reboot into BIOS only to find out that the new disk is detected but shows up as a 0 MB capacity disk!

I tried several scenarios using the rest cables or SATA connectors to see if I had it connected into a defective SATA connector or cable. I changed a few settings at the BIOS that I can't remember right now but nothing fixed the situation. I even unplugged the rest hard drives and tried to boot up using the Windows installation disk which failed. I searched into several websites including Seagate and Tom's Hardware but could not find a solution. I wonder if someone else has ever experienced a similar issue and found a solution. Before I take the disk back to the store from where I bought it I'd like to know if there is something wrong with what I'm doing, or a known issue with a known solution.


Thank you for your time.



My specs

Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2GHz, socket 939)
Asus A8N-SLI (nForce4 Rev.3 chipset/driver v6.65, BIOS revision 1014)
RAM 2x512 MB DDR400 Kingston (1024 MB in total)
Asus Extreme AX700 (Radeon X700 Series, RV410, 256 MB)
HDD Seagate 80 GB SATA II ST3808110AS (the disk where I boot from)
HDD Seagate 400 GB SATA I ST3400832AS (the disk I initially unplugged to connect & configure the new disk)
HDD Western Digital 120 GB IDE WD1200JB-00EVA0
HDD Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 320 GB (external, USB 2.0)
DVD-ROM/RW/DL NEC (Optiarc DVD RW AD-7173A)