Hello,


I have a problem with a new sata drive, an hitachi 7k250 250GB, i just recently purchased, i cant get it to be recognised on my PC. I have only just graduated from standard ide drives so i may be doing something stupid, anyway.

I connect it to the motherboard (asus a8n-sli deluxe) using the first sata port and connect the power, when i turn on the pc the drive spins up for a second and then stops suddenly, it then spins up again almost instantly and stops again (when it stops the whole drive shudders a bit). The drive is not recognised in the bios at all, it doesnt show any sata drives are connected whatsoever. When i have my old ide drive installed at the same time (set as primary master) windows starts to load up but just stays on the black screen constantly and i have to restart the computer. If i put it in on its own and try and install windows the windows setup screen tells me there is no hard drive installed.

I am running windows XP home sp2 and motherboard bios version 1011

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks

What do describe is usually called parking, which occurs if the actuators or motor fails for any reason, or the disk head has crashed on the platter surface. I'm presuming you have a fairly decent power supply, with SATA power connectors, if you have an A8N-SLI series board.

• From memory, that model has both 4 pin/molex and SATA power connectors. Try either, but not both. Using both can cause “unexpected results”.
• Try using different power connectors. Sometimes a power connector can be slightly misaligned insides. This is especially true of 4 pin/molex.
• Change the SATA cable. A bad SATA cable can send bad signals to the drive.
• Try the drive in another computer.

If none of this helps, get a replacement; it’s probably defective.


A few notes, when you do get things working though:
Consult the motherboard diagram in the manual to make sure you're plugging the Hard Drive into a port of the southbridge, and not an external controller.
Make sure SATA RAID is turned off for all SATA channels (from memory, it is enabled by default in the A8N-SLI BIOS)

Thanks for the reply. I found that the Hitachi website has its own customer support area which lets you talk by instant message to a support person. I explained to him about it and now its winging its way back to the place i bought it.

Very useful to know for anyone with an hitachi drive!