A familiar P6T Deluxe problem?

[killayuzz]

hi all,

i have scoured every single corner of every forum including this one and although many seem to have had a similar issue with this board, nobody seems to have a solution

Asus P6T Deluxe
Intel i7 2.66ghz
12gb Corsair DDR3 (6 x 2gb sticks)
XFX GTX285 GPU

this system is just over a year old and has hardly been used until spring this year. it is used solely for video editing. i am currently right in the middle of a big project and everything was fine until i tried to reboot the machine after a short break of an hour or two and i received a warning about reselecting a proper boot device, which i had never seen before (this much seems to be quite a common problem amongst P6T users).

further investigation in the BIOS revealed that the board is no longer seeing any of the three 1TB internal sata disks. one is the western digital, which contains the OS, and the other two contain all my project files. the optical drive is the only device listed.

i have tried out everything i can find, including stripping the machine down and rebuilding it (twice!), but i cannot get any one of the three disks to be recognised. furthermore, i'm not sure they are even spinning. but how could all three internal drives suddenly crash after a perfectly normal shutdown? i have ordered a new disk so will find out in a couple of days whether it is the disks or the board.

the only recommendation i have not managed to try is clearing the CMOS. i followed the manual's instructions to move the jumper but the date in the BIOS remains the same. i don't know how to remove the battery without forcing it.

i also got the latest BIOS using the flash utility, but still nothing. i am at my wit's end and have wasted two days on trying to solve this

please help!

thanks in advance,

simon

 

[treefrog07]

CLR_CMOS doesn't change the date, it resets all the BIOS settings to the default settings. Removing the battery also resets the BIOS settings to their default settings, but the loss of energy causes the clock to fail, which causes the date to reset after you re-insert the battery.

If your HDDs are connected to the board's regular (not jmb63X or e-sata connectors), you can move through the BIOS pages to find the HDD settings. Since you did not say whether or not you are using RAID, I will assume you are not. Change the settings to ACHI, save and exit. Enter the BIOS after re-start and see if the HDDs are there. If not, reset them to legacy or IDE, save and exit. Enter the BIOS and see if the HDDs are there. After you are able to see the HDDs in the BIOS, you will have to select the boot drive, save and exit.

 

[killayuzz]

hi treefrog.

sorry i did neglect to mention that the HDDs are not raided. the SATA settings have been on IDE most of the time and i have already tried changing them to ACHI but with no results. i will try again. this whole thing is so bizarre

thanks for replying!

simon

 

[killayuzz]

UPDATE:

I have just tried connecting a friend's SATA HDD and it was recognised in the BIOS immediately, so i guess this means that for some unknown reason, all three of my internal drives (one western digital with the OS on, and two hitachi deskstars with my projects on) have failed!?!

i can't get any of them to even spin, so i don't know how to begin going about recovery of my data. i have searched high and low on forums and found some lucky people who have managed to replace the HDD's circuit board with an identical one from an identical drive and retrieved their data. this is all very last resort though and it also means finding a replacement drive with identical firmware, which won't be easy, if not impossible.

how the hell can three drives go down at once?

 

[treefrog07]

Your welcome.
Having all three HDDs die at once is highly improbable , unless there was a power spike that killed them. And your friend's HDD being detected.....You are probably correct in replacing the circuit boards on the HDDs. I have no experience on replacing the HDD circuit boards. If you haven't already tried this: I would use different SATA power leads (or even the MOLEX-to-Sata power) from the PSU to your HDDs before I started disassembling the HDDs.
I hope it that simple for you!