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Hard Drives 2 and 4 Randomly don\'t show up in Bios

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Last response: March 1, 2011 11:12 PM in Motherboards

captroper

February 19, 2011 6:11:32 PM

Hi,

I've been having a strange issue over the past year or so. Randomly while in windows one of my drives will not show up. Upon a reboot sometimes it shows up in the bios and sometimes it does not. My boot drive began having the same troubles over the past few months causing me to replace both drives.

The problem is that because this happens at seemingly random times I never know whether what I replaced has truly fixed the problem or not. So far I have replaced both hard drives (several times) and the Power supply. Recently I realized that the two drives that fail are always drives 2 and 4 (2 being my boot drive) Upon reboot the bios will not show either drive and the computer will obviously not boot.

This often will persist for 20 or so reboots in a row, though sometimes gets solved instantly. Since I've replaced both drives and the power supply is clearly good enough (and new) I've began thinking it may be the motherboard. Is there anyway to test to see if it is maybe a sata contoller issue, or is it possible that is my sata data cords or the processor?

My build consists of an I7 Processor, Asus P6t Motherboard 12 gigs of Corsair ram, A Gtx 460, a 800W PSU and 5 Hard drives at the moment, i have seatools and wd live diagnostics on the drives and they all pass, I also have updated the bios on the motherboard, yet the problems still persist.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Adam

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Ubrales

Motherboard Authority

February 19, 2011 6:25:34 PM

Move to a different set of SATA ports. It is quite possible that the SATA controller for the 2 ports in question may be defective. Your User Manual should explain which SATA controller controls the ports in question.

On my motherboard, there are two different chips that control different sets of SATA ports.

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captroper

February 19, 2011 6:51:10 PM

Ubrales said:

Thanks for your prompt reply!

The only mention of the sata controllers that I can find in the manual seems to be in interrupt assignments, it says that there are two of them and they both share control of "E".

I can try simply switching the ports still but I'm not sure how i'd know which controller controlls which port. Also, since it seems to only be happening randomly i'm not sure how I would know if it was working because I switched it or if it was working because it decided to (at the moment they are all working)

Thanks,

Adam

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Ubrales

Motherboard Authority

February 19, 2011 7:00:25 PM

It could also be a defective SATA connector cable. The life of a SATA cable is said to be 25 to 50 connects and disconnects. If one end has a metal clip, the metal clip end must be plugged into the motherboard, and the other end to the device.