Motherboard "killing" my SATA II drives?

[horsewloverfat]

All,

I'm wondering whether my motherboard is shorting out my SATA II drives!

My story:

I had a working SATA2 drive (Seagate 7200.12) in my system for many months. The system:

-- Motherboard: ASROCK 4COREDUAL-SATA2 R2.0 (fully SATA II compliant)
-- Chip: Intel Core2 Duo E7500
-- 4 gig ram
-- PowerColor ATI HD 4670 AGP video graphics
-- 500Gb Seagate 7200.12 SATA II drive, installed on the primary SATA channel

... Everything was working great for many months. Then I bought a new SATA II hard drive -- a Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB drive.

Day 1

-- Installed the new drive on the secondary SATA channel with a new SATA connector and power connector
-- Drive was not detected by BIOS

-- I switched the new drive onto the primary SATA channel, and used the same power connector as the old drive on the primary SATA channel, because I knew these worked. Drive was still not recognized.

-- I figured the drive was dead, so I brought it back to the store and got a replacement.

Day 2

-- Before putting the "new-new" drive on the secondary channel, I first tested it on the primary SATA channel using the same power connector as the old drive. New Drive WAS detected. Great! It really must have been a defective drive, right?

-- So, it must have been the secondary channel data connector and/or the power coupling, don't you think? Just to confirm my theory, I connected these to the -old- (ie. working) SATA2 drive and rebooted. Hmmmm. Drive not detected.

-- Don't panic. I'll just reconnect my old drive to its old data connector and power coupling. Everything will be hunky dory, right?

-- Wrong. Now the OLD drive isn't detected on the primary channel either. I have tried all combinations or data and power connectors, to no avail.

Is my motherboard somehow killing these drives? Has anyone ever heard of anything like this happening?

 

[Fetal]

yes, throw asrock away. how will you recover your data now?