3 TB HD nightmare

[Farscape1]

i bought my first 3 TB HD (HITACHI Deskstar 0S03230 3TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s) and went about the usual process of making it usable.

i hooked it up via eSATA to a windows 7 x32 machine, initialized it (GPT), partitioned it (1 large partition), then quick formatted it. everything went great and the drive showed up with about 2.7 TB available space. transferred files with no issues. ok, everything si great....wrong.

i then hooked up the drive to another windows 7 machine (x64) and expected the drive to get recognized like the couple dozen others (of course all 2 TB and under) had, but to my dismay...nothing. i then went into computer management and i was asked to initialize the disc.

so then i formatted the disc in the x64 machine and everything went fine. then i hooked it up to the x32 machine and the same problem....windows said the disc wasn't initialized.

how do i get both machines to recognize the drive that was formatted in one or the other?

 

[sminlal]

What motherboard and chipset to you have in the machines? I understand that there were some issues using 3TB drives with the Intel ICH chipset drivers - the first 3TB WD bare drives included a SATA controller to sidestep those issues. It may be that installing the latest chipset driver on both machines could solve the problem.

 

[Farscape1]

What motherboard and chipset to you have in the machines? I understand that there were some issues using 3TB drives with the Intel ICH chipset drivers - the first 3TB WD bare drives included a SATA controller to sidestep those issues. It may be that installing the latest chipset driver on both machines could solve the problem.

both have amd chipsets. from what i read, they aren't the issue. the problem was with the intel chipsets (which has been solved with updates).

both machines have no problem recognizing the drive and it's full capacity after it's formatted on that machine. when i swap the drive to the other machine, it isn't recognized.

 

[FireWire2]

Do you have SP1 installed?

 

[Farscape1]

Do you have SP1 installed?

yes, sp1 is installed on both win7 machines

 

[FireWire2]

Hmm does your SATA/eSATA port set as AHCI/Legacy/Compatible

The AHCI is most recommend setting

 

[apache_lives]

first question why are you transporting it around between machines? thats what caddys and external hdd's are for.

It should all be compatible even with GPT between machines and everything, perhaps the issue is with a bios mis-reporting the size on either machine (and windows using the misreported information to make the partition etc, causing issues with other machines etc)

perhaps after formatting and transferring a few files to the hdd followed by a chkdsk repair run on the drive (CHKDSK <DRIVE LETTER>: /F) to check the data might help assure the partition table is correct.

internal drives arent really ment to be moved between systems but still should be as simple as it seems

if you were also "hot plugging" the drive (disconnecting/connecting while the system was on etc) that can sometimes corrupt data (also incorrectly unmounted the hdd etc)

oh and SATA AHCI/RAID/IDE modes should not make a difference, its just communication methods (for the exception of features with RAID and AHCI etc)

 

[Zafaron_96]

I've got the same problem with a new 1TB drive. I initialized and formatted it in Windows 7, 32 bit and later upgraded to Windows 7 64 bit and the hard drive shows up as uninitialized. I can boot from a Ubuntu CD and see all of my data still sitting on the drive, so I know it's a problem with Windows 7. It seems almost like the problem must have something to do with the 32 and 64 bit operating systems.

I'm going to try to reinstall Windows 7 32 to confirm this.

 

[Farscape1]

first question why are you transporting it around between machines? thats what caddys and external hdd's are for.

It should all be compatible even with GPT between machines and everything, perhaps the issue is with a bios mis-reporting the size on either machine (and windows using the misreported information to make the partition etc, causing issues with other machines etc)

perhaps after formatting and transferring a few files to the hdd followed by a chkdsk repair run on the drive (CHKDSK <DRIVE LETTER>: /F) to check the data might help assure the partition table is correct.

internal drives arent really ment to be moved between systems but still should be as simple as it seems

if you were also "hot plugging" the drive (disconnecting/connecting while the system was on etc) that can sometimes corrupt data (also incorrectly unmounted the hdd etc)

oh and SATA AHCI/RAID/IDE modes should not make a difference, its just communication methods (for the exception of features with RAID and AHCI etc)

how do you corrupt the data on a newly formatted drive with no data on it? and i have 4 computers in one room (2 for specialty purposes) and the two i use all the time which are at opposite ends of my desk. i have been swapping drives (not from the inside of one machine to the other) via eSATA for quite some time without ever corrupting a single file.

as stated earlier, this is the first time ever that i've had this problem. and i don't think it's a coincidence that it happened with the 1st 3 TB drive i've owned.

and i seriously doubt that i'm the first person ever to swap drives back and forth between machines so i have no idea why you seem puzzled as to why i would do such a thing.

 

[bluescreen]

Does your motherboard on either system use Intel's RST? I read here that you need to update that software to version 10.1 or later in order to use 3 TB drives successfully. I didn't think this would affect eSATA, only internal drives, but it's at least an idea to explore.

 

[dbyte]

I have one of these Hitachi 0S03230 Deskstar 3TB drives and I have lost all partitions/Data on it 4 times now. I thought it may have been the caddy I had it in .. but even hardwired inside my computer and I am still losing data. My MB is a AMD 990FX Sabertooth. Anyone ever get an answer on why these drives are doing this?

Steve

 

[bluescreen]

I have one of these Hitachi 0S03230 Deskstar 3TB drives and I have lost all partitions/Data on it 4 times now. I thought it may have been the caddy I had it in .. but even hardwired inside my computer and I am still losing data. My MB is a AMD 990FX Sabertooth. Anyone ever get an answer on why these drives are doing this?

Steve

You either have a bad drive or an incompatible component in your system. I've been running two of those 3 TB drives striped together as my video storage volume for quite a while now, without any problems.

 

[dbyte]

Urgh .. I should have updated this .. I ended up sending the drive back to Hitachi .. they sent me another one that has been rock solid since I got it. I am guessing possible a firmware or board update on the drive.