Hard drive not working.

[Guest]

Hi everybody! I have a problem with my SAMSUNG HD501LJ SATA II, 500 GB hard drive. It was used as a primary and only drive for about 3 years. Last OS was win7. Then I started to experience very creepy software problem. Whenever I tried to access explorer It went down. Nothing helped from methods I know, so I decided to perform a format. I had really hard times back-upping everything, because couldn't open any folder, so saved everything from desktop, sent P2P as much as I could. I think I failed with formatting it, I honestly don't remember. I got a different, 120GB Maxtor HDD, SATA. So I used that one as temp, hdd, got OS there, it works. And now its time to fix the SAMSUNG one. When I connected both to the computer, it stucks at the first screen (press del to enter setup), and if you do press it, it will change to entering setup, but nothing will happen, it won't escape that screen. I have a jumper on my main working drive, on MASTER, and don't have a jumper on SAMSUNG. Maybe I should try to connect it after my PC is loaded and working? Please help!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Sata drives don't have master/slave settings. I don't know what you jumpered, but it is most likely incorrect.

 

[Guest]

Okay, you suggest to get jumper off?

 

[Guest]

The same without jumpers.

 

[Guest]

Oh! jumper helped! Just was thinking for a while now I am in windows but don't see the hard drive.

 

[Guest]

I went to BIOS, and there it is kind of detected. When I press on it, it shows only 32 gb not 500, no Vendor, 64 sectors in Block, and 5 lines of "not supported" and the working hdd has all of them supported. Also the broken drive in BIOS is at the Primary IDE Master, and the working is Third IDE Slave. I have nothing else connected to motherboard. I mean, no cd-rooms or floppy's.

 

[fzabkar]

Your SATA controllers appear to be configured for legacy or IDE compatibility mode. That's why they show up as Primary/Secondary Master/Slave.

As for the reduced capacity, some drives have a capacity limitation or "alternative capacity" jumper that limits them to 32GB. If you added this jumper to a drive after it was partitioned and formatted with its full native capacity, then that will explain why Windows doesn't see its file system(s).