Disappearing SATA Drives

[moganti]

I am facing a peculiar problem with SATA Drives on Intel DG33TL motherboard. All of a sudden the SATA Drive disappears, while copying file to or from SATA drive. The drive works fine when connected to USB port externally with a case.

My configuration is:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 [2.66 GHZ]
Motherboard: Intel DG33TL
Memory: Kingston PC2-6400 [2 GB DDR 2 800 MHz]
SATA HDD Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS [250 GB SATA]

I'll be glad if some one can help me.

 

[heavymetalsmith]

I am facing a peculiar problem with SATA Drives on Intel DG33TL motherboard. All of a sudden the SATA Drive disappears, while copying file to or from SATA drive. The drive works fine when connected to USB port externally with a case.

My configuration is:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 [2.66 GHZ]
Motherboard: Intel DG33TL
Memory: Kingston PC2-6400 [2 GB DDR 2 800 MHz]
SATA HDD Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS [250 GB SATA]

I'll be glad if some one can help me.

Well I can't offer you help but I can offer you the knowledge that you aren't alone. I am using:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4
Sata HDD Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3640323AS

The one thing I notice is that we both are using a motherboard with Intel's ICH9R southbridge chipset. I have tested my install on Windows Vista Business 64 bit and Windows XP 32 bit. I've also tried the newest ICH9R drivers to no avail. It still may help with you so you can give them a shot, they are found at.

I am wondering if this is some kind of strange interaction between the Seagate Barracuda series and the ICH9R drives. I'm still looking into a power supply issue with me but frankly I'm not terribly hopeful.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2101&OSFullName=Windows+Vista*+64&lang=eng&strOSs=150&submit=Go!

 

[moganti]

Thank you very much for the reply.

Currently I replaced one Seagate Barracuda SATA drive after it started malfunctioning with the one replaced under warranty and stopped using SATA Port 0 and the problem is not appearing now.

Satyanarayana Moganti

 

[moganti]

Thank you very much for the reply.

Currently I replaced one Seagate Barracuda SATA drive after it started malfunctioning with the one replaced under warranty and stopped using SATA Port 0 and the problem is not appearing now.

Satyanarayana Moganti

 

[JayGVee]

I have the exact same problem. I have 4 x ST3500630AS drives (500GB Seagate Drives) and it is only happening on one of them - the one drive on my 3rd internal SATA port.

I have been trying to figure this out and all I know is that, if I copy smaller files but in larger quantities (MP3 files), it responds just fine. However when I copy large files (1GB files - MKV Movie files) it stops responding and then disappears.
At first I thought the drive was failing, however after running extensive tests on the drive (in DOS and in Windows using Seagate's SeaTools), it has led me to believe it is Vista. The Windows version of SeaTool fails the larger generic test, but the same test in DOS works just fine.

Armed with this new knowledge, I have now decided to use xcopy (from an Admin Command prompt) thinking it may be Aero or a Vista issue, and it seems to be working just fine. I have been able to copy 211 video files without any problems.

I am convinced it is a Vista anomaly or vista driver anomaly.

I might try a vista reinstall to see if that will fix the issue (my winsxs directory is huge - over 15GB and i have been meaning to clean it up).

Jay G Vee.

 

[JayGVee]

UPDATE: Instead of formatting my machine, I tried to just format my drive. Unfortunately each time I tried within Windows (through a command prompt or through explorer) the drive would disappear.

So I opened up my case and decided to arrange the order of my harddrives. I had all three drives immediately one after another, with the one causing the problem right smack in the middle. I moved the one in the middle to the a bay on its own. Now I have drive 1 and 2 right next to each other, but the 3rd drive now has a spare bay below and above it.

I also left the same SATA and power cable plugged in as before so that it is on the same motherboard port and using the same power rail.

I closed the case up and tried formatting it again - SUCCESS!!. In fact, the format was sooooo much faster than the previous attempt. I was able to transfer the data back over and to my surprise, I was getting approximately 80Mbps when before I was only getting about 20Mbps.

So in conclusion, I suspect sine overheating OR some sort of interference along my SATA cable. I did have the sata cable really close to my video card. Either the heat coming off the video card was changing the thermodynamics of the cable, OR it was causing some sort of EMF interference with the data transfer.

I suspect the later.

Good luck, I hope you have the same success as I did.