Unusual SATA HDD problem

[Saxito Pau]

HEar this scenario.

1. bought a new Western Sigital Caviar SE 80Gb serial ATA HDD
2. hook it up to my 2 wk old MSI KM4M motherboard. thing won't spin up. Not recognized by bios.
3. disconnect data cable and leave power cable plugged. drive spins, but obviously still won't detect (no data cable!)
4. return it to store and it work fine on their motherboard, show up in bios and everything. Tech puts jumper on drive for power management
5. Still won't detect or spin up when I returned home (see 2., 3. above). change data cable, SATA port, power cable, unplug other devices, check bios settings. no effect. mobo bios is most recent verson.  I currenty have another WD 200GB SATA that has been working fine.

any ideas??

[Spazosaurus]

Sounds like a broken SATA controller. Any other SATA drive worked on the board? Perhaps a BIOS update is all that's needed.

[Saxito Pau]

 my WD 200GB SATA drive works fine on both SATA connectors.

and as i mentioned originally the current board BIOS is the most recent (unless one can update the SATA BIOS separately)

[Spazosaurus]

Hmmmm probably its just a compatibility issue with that particular board and drive. Ive seen things work in one board and not another. Does the controller initialise the drive at startup? If it does maybe its a driver problem.

[Saxito Pau]

I shall have to concur.

I resurrect an unsed Biostar M7VIG and Sempron 2600+ I have and get all the same results as with the MSI board.

the techs at the store say that particular model drive have compatibility isuues with those boards. Strange.

however they were nice enough to take it back and give me an Hitachi IDE 82.3GB (yeah, it says so on the label, so finally windows should say 80.0GB )

[Spazosaurus]

Cool. You know what might have worked too? If u could get a PCI sata controller and connect the drive to that. Maybe then it would have been recognised porperly.