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  1. Member wulf109's Avatar
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    I have an old X58-UD5 motherboard that won't recognize any Sata hard drives. It has 10 Sata ports,I tried them all,no luck. It will recognize DVD drives however. It has an IDE connector and that works,I installed 2 old 80gb IDE drives,no problem. Any idea why the SATA ports won't recognize SATA HD's?
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  2. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Mainboard driver ?
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  3. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Did you check in Disk Management to see if they are listed there? 'Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management' Also you can check in BIOS as the PC boots. Click the 'Delete' key on most motherboards to get into BIOS. They should be listed. If not, you may need to install some MB drivers.
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  4. Member turk690's Avatar
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    I'm also mainly using an x85-UD3 board and this makes me quiver like raw sushi if the SATA ports are indeed fried. But this is what I'd do, in this order:
    • Power down (AC cord unplugged), remove lithium coin battery for 10mins. This will reset all BIOS settings to default.
    • Check battery, should be 3.0Vdc or a bit higher. Anything below 3.0V, toss it. Dying coin batteries have been known to introduce flakey settings in BIOS.
    • Power up and inspect if you have latest BIOS f/w; update if not.
    • Minutely inspect the SATA cables you are using. IMHO SATA cable connectors are flimsy and provide poor contact; a cross look has been known to kill them. One big beef is that they can easily be pulled off; many good current ones have locking clasps to prevent this. If you suspect yours as defective, toss ASAP.
    • SATA power cable connectors are guilty of the same crime. Though they are designed to carry +12V, +5V, & +3.3V, all current HDDs that use them do not require the +3.3V line. A defective power cable may not be or only intermittently connecting one of the voltages, giving the assumption a SATA port doesn't work. It's more difficult to dump suspected SATA power cables/connectors esp. if they are connected to the PSU; a solution is molex PS/2-to-SATA power cable.
    Unlike USB, SATA connections (data and power) are not designed to be disconnected while powered up; SATA chipsets may be damaged. (Actually, there are self-healing fuses on the mobo that restore connectivity afterwards; if in your case they've permanently gone to heaven then that's too bad).
    If SATA is really dead or can't connect then you may have to get a PCI-e SATA card to get along, if you still like your x58. I still love mine.
    For the nth time, with the possible exception of certain Intel processors, I don't have/ever owned anything whose name starts with "i".
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  5. Member turk690's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by redwudz View Post
    Did you check in Disk Management to see if they are listed there?...
    It's not clear with OP if any form of windoze is in any of the 80GB drives he has connected via IDE.
    For the nth time, with the possible exception of certain Intel processors, I don't have/ever owned anything whose name starts with "i".
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  6. Member wulf109's Avatar
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    When I enter BIOS the SATA HD are not listed. Since there not listed the computer won't boot. I'm using Windows XP.
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    Slight change there is a power supply issue or maybe an issue with the voltage rails on the motherboard (bad capacitors). I would try cables first.
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  8. Renegade gll99's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by wulf109 View Post
    I have an old X58-UD5 motherboard that won't recognize any Sata hard drives. It has 10 Sata ports,I tried them all,no luck. It will recognize DVD drives however. It has an IDE connector and that works,I installed 2 old 80gb IDE drives,no problem. Any idea why the SATA ports won't recognize SATA HD's?
    I don't believe it's bad sata ports....... I can think of 2 possibilities:

    This goes back a while so my memory has faded.......

    1) Since you say it will recognize DVD drives (if you mean connected to a sata port) this is the most likely cause.....

    I didn't look up the specs for your board but if it's an older mb it may only support SATA 1.5Gb/s speeds so you may have to set a jumper on the drive to slow it down if you have a newer faster sata drive.

    http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8142

    Example:

    http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en

    and/or

    If I misunderstood and the sata ports do not work at all for any type of drive......

    2) When I installed XP on an older MB it did not recognize the sata ports because the drivers were not on my original xp discs. I had to d/l them from the mb manufacturer (mine were VIA chipset). I put them on a floppy disk or cd (can't recall) and when the window installer said to press a certain function key to install external drivers (or something like that) I did so and pointed it to the drivers and the rest is history. I don't know if they can be added after the fact but it might be worth Googling it.
    There's not much to do but then I can't do much anyway.
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  9. Member turk690's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by wulf109 View Post
    When I enter BIOS the SATA HD are not listed. Since there not listed the computer won't boot. I'm using Windows XP.
    Are the SATA ports listed? How the SATA ports and HDDs are listed will depend on whether you chose IDE, RAID or AHCI. You might try switching between them to see what happens.
    This mobo actually has two SATA groups in it: the one normally part of ICH10, and another separate on-board Gigabyte SATA controller with a JMicron chipset or SiliconImage. Depending on what OS you install and how you go about it, in addition to whether you chose IDE, RAID, or AHCI will determine how successful you are in using those ports.
    In my case I chose the separate controller for a RAID1 config where I connected the boot drives, and require F6 in the course of windoze 7 OS installation.
    For the nth time, with the possible exception of certain Intel processors, I don't have/ever owned anything whose name starts with "i".
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  10. Member wulf109's Avatar
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    Thanks for all the suggestions. I pulled all 3 HD's out and formatted them in a different computer. When I re-installed them in the X58-UD5 they were now all recognized by the motherboard and I was able to install Windows XP without any problem.
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  11. Could the hard drives have been configured for RAID at some stage, or were any of the SATA controllers set to operate in RAID mode?

    I'm pretty sure once RAID mode is activated (old Gigabyte MB here), SATA hard drives don't appear in the "normal bios". Instead you need to enter the RAID BIOS once the normal BIOS has finished doing it's thing. Ctrl+I.... maybe..... something like that. When the SATA controller is set to run in IDE or AHCI mode, then the drives should appear in the "normal BIOS" and the "RAID BIOS" probably doesn't make an appearance when booting.
    My motherboard has an Intel SATA controller and a JMicron one (labelled as Gigabyte in the BIOS, I think), but I'm pretty sure they both work the same way.

    Any chance that you reset the BIOS around the same time you removed the drives and reformatted them using a different computer? I don't think reformatting should effect whether the drives appear in the normal BIOS but could a reset at the same time make it appear as though it did? Or maybe the removal of the drives caused the BIOS to think there was a problem and reset itself, although I don't think that includes changing the SATA controller mode.

    I'm just trying to come up with an explanation for what happened.
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  12. What you did shouldn't have had any effect, unless the cables were bad or not on tight.

    Are you sure you were looking at connected drives and not the bootable drive list?

    The Raid mode would be the only other thing, also some old mobos having both IDE ports on means some SATA are disabled.
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