ASUS P6T no hard drive found

jenealogy

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Apr 24, 2009
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Just built a computer and hooked the SATA (red) cable to SATA1 on the mobo to my hard drive and DVD R/W to the SATA2. In BIOS it sees both, but as it is loading up I get the message (very quickly before it disappears) "detect drives done, no drive found". What am I doing wrong? This is my first time with a mobo with SATA. I have the driver CD that came with the mobo. When do I put that in? In the past with XP I just booted up, put in the OS and off I went. I'd like to load my Vista Home Premium 64bit, but if it can't see the hard drive, I think I have a problem . . .
 

grandpa

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Haven't got a solution for you, friend, but I do have the exact same problem with my hard drive. Changed BIOS to AHCI and got black screen (did muck aound with some other settings, Q-Fan and disabled Floppy {haven't got one}. Back to default, no problem except Vista acts like it's loading my programs, but won't play them.
 

chinh_n

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jeanealogy,

There is nothing wrong with your system. The no drives detected that you see is the jmicron ide controller on the board. if you have no ide drives connected then it shows no drive detected. it does not detect your sata drives because its on a different controller.

Grandpa,
you can't just turn to AHCI mode without first loading the drivers for it. thats the reason why you getting the black screen. if you want to go with AHCI mode, you will need to reinstall windows and load AHCI drivers during windows installation.


HOPE THIS HELP YOU GUYS!! :)
 

grandpa

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Thanks for the leads, guys. Power's good. But I don't remember Vista asking me about HD drivers but I'm going to un and re install and will put down my drink this time.

Still, the BIOS does see the HD and the DVD drives and does say treat SATA as IDE but then says no HD detected. I get the suspicion that is behind Vista apparently loading my software but not running them. Get a logo and then it fades away, no error message, nada. Silly question maybe, but could these be loading on my 6 gigs of RAM?

Oh yeah, the ASUS DVD. I'll run that after Vista uninstall.
 

jenealogy

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I finally got mine working. Don't know which of the following made the difference, but in BIOS I disabled the jmicron ide controller and reordered the what it boots from to be HD, floppy (I don't have one either), and then CD. The other thing that I did was to download new drivers for the SATA drives and the NIC card. After 2 tries, I found drivers that actually worked -- not the ones that came with the mobo. Then I could get my pc to boot from the Vista cd and complete the install. Good luck to you!
 

jenealogy

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The NIC drivers for my rtl81xx series network adapter was a zip file named "Install_Vista_6218_0417.zip" off the RealTek website. I don't remember where the sata drivers were.
 

grandpa

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Got mine running, lookin' good, but ASUS had a little surprise for me! You know, like when you but the stuff in the bag on Halloween, light it on fire, and ring the doorbell? See Post.
 

coffen

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Coffen here: Thanks guys that Detecting drives error was annoting me. Running sweet now!
 

jeremylee31

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Hi all- new to forums here but not Toms hardware... I joind the forum 'cause I need help!

I have the same problem with starting from scratch. I have the P6T and i7 920. I am starting a new build and my BIOS won't detect the WD caviar black 1TB sata i have plugged in. I already did the dummy checks on myself- checked cables between the DVD drive and HDD to make sure, reset the BIOS doing the jumper trick in the manual. Checked different sata ports. I tried going back and forth between IDE/SATA/AHCI settings. The POST shows there is a HDD there, but nothing detected in the BIOS. I even disabled the JMICRON to see if that would change anything. I was going to flash the BIOS to the newest but I read what the changes are from the version I have and the new and it says nothing about SATA updates.

I plugged the HDD into a SATA to USB cable I borrowed from a friend but when I plug it into my laptop (running xp sp3) it says a mass usb storage device is detected- but it can't see it in "my computer". I tried plugging it in through this usb method to the new build and in the POST it shows the same thing- usb mass storage device detected. But when I get to windows7 rc load screen it says I can't load windows through usb- plus it won't let me do anything with the drive (format) and it doesn't show info on it- just generic label that its a HDD.

I tried one more time through SATA connection on the mobo and it hangs up in the POST where it says detecting SATA port 1- it just locks up and stays there. I hear a "click, click, click, clack" pattern repeatdly. I'm pretty sure its a bad hard drive after all this testing. I'm ready to RMA this bad boy to Newegg. Any thoughts from anyone else? I'm tapped on ideas and think it's the HDD. I've been out of the PC building trade a while (I was in the Army a bit and slacked on my geeking skills) so SATA is new to me. Please help me out or confirm my diagnosis.

Thanks a lot!
Jeremy
 

neiroatopelcc

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sounds like you've got a bad drive yes.
The only suggestion I have for you has nothing to do with making this work. Instead of sending the drive to newegg, wouldn't it be faster to rma it directly at wd? I don't know how fast newegg is with replacements, but at least in denmark it's actually faster to send the broken drive to wd in germany (I live at the border) than it is to send it to the retail shop and wait for them to wake up.