Sometimes you get bitten by the goofiest things in computing. I bought a nice new 320 GB Samsung SATA hard drive. I like Samsung drives. They’re quiet and reliable, and good performers. I like nice little skinny SATA cables.
So I crack open the box (Antec Sonata, minus the silly CPU exhaust tube that made the interior case temperature warmer and took up all kinds of room, but otherwise a splendid case) and in less time than it takes to say “Voila! That was so easy I should blog about it!” the new drive was ready to use.
But. It didn’t work.
So I spent the best part of the morning troubleshooting. Is it the SATA cable? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the power connector? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the SATA port on the mobo? Swap with the other SATA drive. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down.
I can hear some of you shouting the solution already- yes, the motherboard supports only SATA I, and this is a SATA II drive. So the drive needs a jumper across pins 3 and 4 to disable SATA II. Naturally I completely forgot all about this issue, even though there was already an SATA drive on the system, and- you guessed it- also jumpered.
Too soon old, too late smart! But maybe my sad tale will help someone else.
Samsung drives disable SATA II mode with a jumper across pins 3 and 4:
power sata 7531 connector connector 8642
On Western Digital drives it’s pins 5 and 6. Other drives, you’re on your own, and remember that Maxtor bought Quantum, and then Seagate bought Maxtor. So Seagate.com has technical archives for all three brands.
**update**
There is one more plot twist in this little soap opera. The motherboard is an ASRock K7VT4A Pro, which uses the VIA VT8237 South Bridge chipset. This came before SATA II (3 GB/s), so it supports only SATA (1.5 GB/s). Newer chipsets are able to auto-negotiate the correct drive speed so you don’t have to worry about it, and can use both SATA and SATA II drives.
I put a Western Digital SATA II drive on the system way back when, jumpered of course, and it has performed reliably for a couple of years. The new Samsung drive has an interesting twitch: the system does not recognize the drive on a cold start, but it does on a reset or reboot. So apparently something different happens on a warm restart that doesn’t happen on a cold start. Once it’s up it’s fine, and doesn’t disappear mysteriously, which is another symptom of SATA protocol-negotiation follies.
I have another Western Digital SATA II drive in an external Rosewill SATA enclosure, also jumpered, and have never had any problems with it either. So maybe Samsung is different in some way. Or the planets are aligned unfavorably for Samsung. Whatever it is, it works now, so I’m going back to my rocking chair and grumbling “too much change too fast. Get off my lawn.”
Ah Carla, a queen among sysadmins. One day I will need this, and I'd never, ever have found it for myself! Who'd have thought it!
O_O rtfm?
I have been bitten by the ever-popular "disabled the HD port in the BIOS" issue more than once - it seems so silly, but that is just too easy to forget. I've not had to jumper any drives for backwards compatability, but I cna see how that could trip you up.
I am quite happy that the industry has moved beyond "cable select" IDE (a real problem if you jumper a drive to be the slave then put it on the master connector of a cable select cable. Oh, and if you get the jumpers and cable confused, it all works fine with one drive no matter what you do, but that second drive will cause problems), and we are almost beyond the "upside down" floppy connector (which causes the floppy to spin like crazy, never stopping, until you power-down the system).
thank you very very much....you really helped me with the same problem...i spent about three hours installing the HDD, then i was depressed..i searched the net..till i found your great efort that solved the problem in seconds.
thank you