Faulty Drive? or SATA III/II compatibility issue

[ballzac]

Howdy,

I just bought a Seagate Barracuda 2TB Sata 6Gb/s drive (ST2000DL003) to put in my HTPC. The HTPC is running XBMC live from a 500GB HD, and the second drive was just for extra storage. The motherboard on the HTPC is an EVGA H55V.

The drive does not show up in BIOS. It doesn't make any clicking noises or anything. I think it's running, but it could be vibrations coming from other components in the computer that I can hear/feel. I've tried it on two other PCs as well. Both with different Gigabyte motherboards. I've tried different SATA cables, and I've tried using cables that are working fine with other drives. All of my other drives have always shown up in BIOS automatically.

All three computers have SATA 3Gb/s ports, so I thought maybe I needed a jumper to set the drive speed. I looked on the Seagate website and they said the jumper on the back is for factory use only. For their 3Gb/s drives, they do indeed explain how to set the jumper for a 1.5Gb/s motherboard. I know this works because I have SATA 3Gb/s drives running in an older computer using this method.

Also wondering if drivers or something are required for the motherboard to detect the drive, and how I would go about installing them on XBMC if this is the case. If these drives aren't easily installed, it's weird that there's not a lot of info about it on the Seagate website. I could understand if it was just one computer that didn't detect it, but considering I've tried on three different computers, either the drive is faulty, or there's some setup procedure that is generally required (perhaps only on SATA 3Gb/s motherboards) that isn't mentioned anywhere.

If anyone has any advice or can think what the problem would be, I'd much appreciate it
I live about 100 miles from the place I bought it from, so I don't really want to take it back if it's not actually faulty, and I think I've exhausted all avenues of googling the drive, motherboard, installation methods and compatibility issues.

Thanks

 

[matthewm1987]

have u got another pc if u do i recommed u to unstall your harddrive plug in another pc and bt plug the data cable in another ide slot or sata slot on your motherbroad and format the drive in my computer in ms dos how many watts is your psu pal add me on msn fitness_boy_2004@hotmail.co.uk i do online chat on computers am a computer consultant

 

[cboucher]

On some motherboards you have to enable each SATA port you intend to use separately in BIOS. You'll have to look at the actual SATA connector on the motherboard to find out which number is assigned to it. It does seem odd that this would be the case on three separate PCs, though. You might want to try hooking it to an external USB HDD enclosure. If it's not detected via USB then you're probably looking at a bad HDD.

 

[ballzac]

have u got another pc if u do i recommed u to unstall your harddrive plug in another pc and bt plug the data cable in another ide slot or sata slot on your motherbroad and format the drive in my computer in ms dos how many watts is your psu pal add me on msn fitness_boy_2004@hotmail.co.uk i do online chat on computers am a computer consultant

A fourth PC? Honestly, I appreciate you trying to help, but you need to read my post for that help to be useful. I asked the same thing on another forum and got a reply that maybe the sata cable or sata port was bad . Was there something confusing about the way I worded my post? I thought it was pretty clear.

Anyway, my girlfriend took it to work and gave it to the IT guy who said it doesn't work.

Thanks to both of you for trying to help.