The Case of the Vanishing Sata Drives

[heavymetalsmith]

The Mystery:

I have a Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4 motherboard and I've run into a problem. One or more of the three ST3640323AS drives vanish from Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition. These vanishes are usually characterized by a sudden jump in CPU cycles and system pausing before any program running from that device crashes. This is followed by the corresponding drive disappearing from windows.

Notes:
- System restart does not return drives, they are gone in bios.
- System power off and power on always restores drives.
- Have not been able to get drives to vanish in DOS environment during testing.
- Have tried new SATA cables, swapping power cables, etc.
- Have tried swapping SATA ports.
- Motherboard has been RMAed and returned with no problems.

A Clue:

After looking online it seems that people have had issues with the ICH9R chipset from Intel and Windows Vista 64 bit. I have tried using gigabytes pre-install drivers and their drivers after install and they are supposedly vista compatible.

I've also had a friend run one of the failed drives for several complete writes and wipes with no problems.

So I have to assume its a problem between the Sata Drives, the ICH9R Sata Controller, and the Windows Vista 64x drivers.

Does anyone have any clues or should I just light my desktop on fire?

 

[bilbat]

I have a DS5 (same family - same ICH9R) with 6 drives in three RAID arrays (four VRs in two RAID0s, and a pair RE3s in RAID1), running: VUx86, VUx64, Xpx86, & Xpx64, all without any problems; I suggest you dl the latest drivers directly from Intel & give it another whack...

 

[heavymetalsmith]

I have a DS5 (same family - same ICH9R) with 6 drives in three RAID arrays (four VRs in two RAID0s, and a pair RE3s in RAID1), running: VUx86, VUx64, Xpx86, & Xpx64, all without any problems; I suggest you dl the latest drivers directly from Intel & give it another whack...

I've just tried the official ICH9R drivers from Intel during install. Still the same issue, in fact install fails after about 20% when the drive(s) drop out. I am going to check my power supply today, though it seems strange that every other component is working fine.

 

[heavymetalsmith]

Thought I would add in for others who are having SATA problems some links that I had trouble finding:

Intel ICH9R Driver:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2101&OSFullName=Windows+Vista*+64&lang=eng&strOSs=150&submit=Go!

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Firmware:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957

I've tried both of these but who knows others may have more luck.

 

[bilbat]

Had a random thought: are you powering the drives from a PSU with native sata power plugs, or are you using molex to sata adaptors? Bought a small pile of those the other day, & had 2 bad ones out of five or six - and both were intermittents, seemed to drop out when connector was stressed a certain direction, hard to find...