MAXTOR SATA 300GB HD not recognized by BIOS...

I'm having the EXACT same problem PRELUDiCON is having.
Asus P4P800 Deluxe MB
Maxtor 120 SATA on SATA1

and I want to add a 200 gig maxtor on sata2
I have tried everything he has tried and end up witht he same results. :dead:

@PRELUDiCON - you haven't posted in a while, have you found a solution???

Hot Damn!! I figured it out.
I took all four connections out of the two drives (2 sata and 2 power) I then plugged the Maxtor 200 gig back in and the Bios loaded it! This tells me that the drive is fine. I connect the second sata and neither of them can be seen. I then disconnected the sata wire but left the power in. Still I cannot see any drives. I pull the power out of the second sata that I'm not using and voila! I can see the drive!

The problem was that I was trying to power both satas off one power line. I know you can do that with ide but sata doesn't seem to like it. I took a seperate power line from the power supply and now they both work great. Damn... all that bios stuff for nothing.

@PRELUDiCON - I'm sure that's your problem too, give it a try. The way you explained your problem was identical to mine. Let me know if it works for you.!


I hope this helps anyone else out that might come across this problem.!!
:bounce: :angel:

in case it helps somebody...
also my problem is solved by connecting the HD to the SATA RAID 1 input in stead of the SATA 1 input.
when starting my pc, the HD shows up in the starting screen, but still can't be seen in the BIOS.
When installing Xp, you push F6 to install SCSI/RAID drivers and insert a floppy containing the latest drivers as can be found on the ASUS website when prompted.

pretty happy it works, but still I don't understand why it wouldn't work when plugged into the SATA 1 port.
Also strange fact is that my system during startup only seems to recognise 189 Gb...

Sorry I've been absent from this board for a while, strangely did not receive any email notifications of any new posts, as I did receive in the past. Just assumed the thread was 'dead' lol.

I leave my PC on 24/7 so once I got the drive to read after a pain in the *** and a half, It was working fine for 3 weeks, since I never turned it off. This weekend my PC froze all of a sudden, while watching a DvD. Froze completely, no HD activity light nothing, D E A D. Was forced to hit the reset button on the PC, didn't boot, got that audio error message "system failed due to CPU overclocking" ... I'm not overclocking. Regardless, let it cool for a few minutes, powered her up, surprise, surprise, no HD detected! I figure that it froze like that in the first place because of the same reason it doesn't detect most of the time.

Even took my drive to a 'professional', who tested my drive on a brand new, working PC, did not detect and caused it to hang @ bootup.

He concluded the drive is bad, I should get my money back and get a different one, Maxtor is no good, get yourself a WD drive.

I said OK, thanks. Got home, thought about my options, and about what he said and realized...he's an *****. The brand new working PC on which he tested my drive on was equiped with an ASUS P4P800 board, 'kinda' like the one I have!! :hotouch:

I do believe I have found a solution.

edo075...it's probably the same thing you did.

I typed in to Google "6B300S0 problems", and the 2nd or 3rd hit was some www.techsupportforum.com, which took me to a post which had a link to the GERMAN ASUS ftp site...where I found the latest BIOS update 1021 BETA version. According to the thread, this was suppose to fix compatibility issues, such as the ones I'm having. I flashed my BIOS with this version, restarted the PC, no problems.

And then the real test, powered down the PC, waited few minutes, powered up, BAM, read my drives INSTANTLY, no lag, no hang, no issue whatsoever.

Here's the link:

ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/BIOS/Socket_478/INTEL_Chipset/i865pe/

I haven't tested this power up/down repeatedly or anything ... just that one time. But from experience, before I updated to this BETA version, @ any time I would power down and then power up, it would not detect the drives.

I find it odd that the US ASUS website doesn't have this BIOS update available for download, even in their BETA downloads section. Don't mess with the Germans !!

Doozerr2...I don't think it's a power cable issue with me, and that doesn't make sense [alot about PC's don't make sense, I know, lol, it just is]. Maybe it's your power supply or something. If you have the same MOBO, I suggest you flash your BIOS to the above BETA version 1021, and try your setup with the one power cable which you were running originally, just to confirm your theory.

CHEERS !!!

Hi
I'm new to this forum. I am building a PC and having similar issues that was noted in this forum. Would be great if I could get some help. My mobo is ASUS A8V Deluxe with a AMD64 3400+ processor. I bought couple of Maxtor DiamondMax 9 SATA HDD (160GB & 80GB). No intention of setting up RAID. I connected the SATA data and power cables as specified in the Manual. When I power up, the Hard drives are not displayed in the BIOS setup screen. When the PC goes thro' the initial test process, I can see that it recognizes the presence of the 2 HDD. But they do not show up in the BIOS screen. Then I tried to load Windows XP, just for the heck of it. It came back saying that there are no hard drives installed. Any information would be appreciated. If you need more info, please shoot.
Thanks!!

i think it's ok when it doesn't show up in the bios

just install your XP and press F6 (during installation XP) when asked &
install the SATA driver ( from the ASUS cd ? or dowload it upfront )

that should do it

Thanks Stiebz. I hit F6 while loading Windows XP and it is expecting a Floppy disk labeled Manufacturer supplied Support disk. I got a CD from ASUS which had some drivers for different O/S and copied them on to a floppy disk and inserted that when asked. But, it still keeps asking me to insert the floppy disk over and over again or quit. Wonder what could be wrong??
Pl. advise. Thanks much.

OK. The link below has very good instruction on how to get Windows XP setup and have your HDD be recognized. This is exactly what I was missing (and needed). Just thought would post it in case it might come in handy for someone.
Thanks again for the initial guidance...that pointed me in this direction.
http://www.chovy.com/2004/12/install-sata-hdd-on-asus-a8v-deluxe.html

Same problem, but this time:
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard
Again: Maxtor 300gb SATA disk (6B300S0)

Whenever I power my computer down for a longere period of time, it won't detect ANY of my other drives at all (including the 300gigs)!
My other drives is:
2x Maxtor 80gb IDE drives
Plextor DVD drive and a NEC DVD writer (can't remember the model nr., but it's brand new!

I usually try to disconnect all drives and then reconnect them, and after a couple of tries, it will probally work - not every time tho :suspiciou

edo075, I would like to hear more about your solution to the problem! What bios update did you exactly use?

Best regards
trex_dk

Have you tried/followed the process laid out in the link that I had forwarded? What OS are you using?

I think it's working now, I have just flashed the bios to a new beta. I found it on the german ftp that PRELUDiCON linked to!

So thx everyone! It helped me a lot!

Glad it helped !! :grinthumb


To update....my system has been working flawlessly ever since I upgraded my BIOS to the beta version found on the German ftp site.

I remember seeing stuff on that site for other ASUS boards as well.

And I cannot believe that the North American ASUS website STILL does not offer this version for download!! WTF!? :unch: (makes me wonder if there is any particular reason for this or they're just being overly anal)

Maxtor SATA 300GB Bios detection SOLVED!

Applies to all Maxtor DiamontMax & MaXline SATA drives! (Mine is 300 GB, 7200 rpm, 16 MB Cache SATA on Gigabyte 7N400 Pro 2 rev. 2)

Many people including me, can not recognize this drives or their motherboards are recognizing them hard, and mainly have problems with detecting them when cold boot.

All this drives have feature calld "Staggered Spin-up Detection". This feature is for servers &/or more than 2 drives to power up one by one, this makes the power supply's work esier when turning on such a system. This also makes it possible to run machines with multiple HDD's with lower power supplyes. They are cheaper also. Anyway this feature must bi off (Disabled) on PC's, or when there are one or two HDD's on the system.

By the SATA specifications the SATA HDD power cable is with 4 pins on the PSU side & 15 pins on the HDD side. By this specifications, Pin 11 is reserved (not used), and should be grounded or pulled low.

These series of Maxtor SATA HDD's are using this pin 11 for turning that feature on & off. When it is on, the HDD is waiting for more initializations more time that any standard Sata controller, Bios & motherboard will wait. So when it is off, the HDD acts like normal PC SATA drive.

Because this pin 11 is reserved for future use by SATA specifications, many SATA power cable manifacturers leave this pin going nowhere instead of grounding it (because it is not supposed to be used), but in our case it automatically enables the feature. So this drives auto sense if pin 11 is connected to power, not connected or grounded.

IMPORTANT: If Pin 11 is not connected or connected to power supply, that means that "Staggered Spin-up Detection" is enabled, & your HDD will NOT be recognized or not recognized all the time by the bios!

SOLUTION: Pull ot the power cable from the PSU & the HDD, and count 11th Pin, start counting from the side with the adge. Ground this pin to your case for example (to some screw)

More Info: http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor...ction-pin11.pdf

Hope it helps everyone, sorry for the long POST & for my english, remember... I'am Bulgarian

I am having a similar problem with my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe. It will not cold boot with the MAXTOR 6B300SO hard drive. I had been going round and round with it for two weeks. I was glad to see that a solution exists. I am talking about the new BIOS, not drilling the hole.

I checked all of the ASUS sites. The Beta BIOS they have for the P4C800-E Deluxe is the 1020.001. Unfortunately, it does not solve the problem for me.

I'll just resign myself to waiting for the next Beta upstep. In the meantime, I have told both ASUS and Maxtor about both the problem and the solution you people found. (The Maxtor people claimed that this was the first they had heard of the problem!)

Very interesting indeed that they would say that, and not surprising since they really haven't provided any fix...and I'm still wondering who's more to blame, Maxtor or ASUS?? Either way, one or both of them should provide some sort of solution for this compatibility issue. Below is a copy of my email to/from Maxtor support...

That's how it started and they did NOT provide any help or leads as to where I might get help. The emails stopped when I 'thought' I figured it out by changing a setting in the BIOS, this was a false alarm and eventually found the German ASUS ftp site. These companies suck for service...

As for your situation, I believe you really have to wait for ASUS to come out with another update that is compatible with your drive...maybe try contacting them ?? Although, I had similar email exchanges with ASUS as the one above with MAXTOR, to no avail. Either the companies are really clueless, or the people answering emails are. :hotbounce

I just got an email from Maxtor, telling me to call them Monday. I think what got them interested was my telling them to Google "6B300S0 problems."

My email from ASUS was a generated one telling me that thay would contact me in 48 hours, plus or minus. From what I have read, it will be at least a week and be of no value.

Well, I did hear from ASUS within 48 hours. Here are their words of wisdom:

For your problem ,please try the following doings :
#1 Clear the cmos
#2 Reflash your bios to the latest version
#3 Change another memory to have a test
#4 Change your VGA card
#5 Change another power supply
#6 Reinstall your OS
#7 Scan for virus at last.
If All of the above have done and still the problem ,then please contact our local service for the motherboard testing.

I guess they also want me to change to another brand of MB.

Wow! I love how they see our concerns as 'generic' issues, and try to put the blame on every other component they can think of. Seems like they just assume we're braindead and think our CD-ROM tray is a cup holder. They might as well just scrap the support section from their website and direct you to the useless FAQ.

You would expect a huge company like ASUS to do product compatibility testing with every single product out there, and especially once prompted by customers that a particluar product seems to have compatibility issues.

Another thing is that when I wrote my email to ASUS regarding the BIOS update [German BETA 1021] that I found, asking why it's not available on the North American website for download, they didn't even respond.

On top of all this, even though my drive seems to be functioning properly, over the past few days I began noticing slight tapping/ticking noises coming from it! ... I don't see any difference in drive performance or any lag what so ever, but this does raise concern.

Does anyone know how to effectively test a drive's integrity/performance without first wiping it clean?

Update:

My phone call to Maxtor resulted in their sending me a firmware patch. After reading the instructions on installing it, I think I had better wait a little longer until I can get some more input from others. Here is what they said:

- - - -
Attached is a file called BANC1BM0.txt Please rename this file to *.exe and then double click. This will create a bootable floppy that You can use to update the firmware on your drives. (Note: This update Has only been tested on standard SATA controllers. This may not work on SATA Raid controllers!)
1. Boot to the floppy it will load a program called "dload".
2. Once you are in this program after a few minutes you will see a menu.
3. At this point all you have to do is hit enter on the default selection in that menu which is "Download all code (Disk & Boot)".
4. It then goes out and searches for the drive and updates the firmware on it.
5. Once this process is finished it will prompt you to hit any other key to exit.
6. Do so. This will leave you at an A:\ prompt.
7. Type in "dload" at the prompt. Once it scans the drives look in the upper left hand corner of the screen and you will see the new firmware code of "BANC1BM0". If this is what it reads the update was successful and you
can power down the machine and install the next drive.
8. Repeat this process until all of the drives have been updated.
- - - -

My concern is that my other 3 drives are Western Digital. I'm concerned that this patch might try to fix them. They are not causing any problems. Also, my main two drives are set up RAID Stripe 0. I don't want to end up with NOTHING working. My MB is a P4C800-E Deluxe. It has two set of SATA connectors. I know the first two are RAID. However, I never did know if the second set of SATA connectors were raid or not.

I doubt the HD firmware upgrade will help, it doesn't make sense for a brand new drive to immediately require this in order to be recognized by a MOBO.

But if ASUS isn't helping you, and this is what MAXTOR recommends you do...and you're willing to try it on the MAXTOR, why don't you, if possible, disconnect all other drives during this process to ensure that the upgrade doesn't try to 'fix' anything else...

MAXTOR should recall these drives for all the headaches they're causing with their premature product.