Topic: Windows 7 and 2nd hard drive problem

[spyder9]

I'm having issues with my 2nd internal hard drive.  My main drive is an SSD.  The 2nd drive & SSD were installed over the holidays.

When the the new 2nd drive is in the PC, Windows 7 hangs and takes forever to load.  BIOS sometimes doesn't recognize it at all.  Once W7 does boots up, I can see the new HDD in Explorer, but the volume reads 0.  Its a 1 TB drive.

However, when I pull the 2nd drive from the system, and mount it on an external esata enclosure (w/ ac adapter), BIOS and W7 recognizes it and everything boots fast and clean. 

Could it be my PSU is maxed out?  I did check the other sata ports and even swapped sata cables.  And I did a checkdisk on the 2nd drive and it passed.  Everything seems to point to the PSU.

Dell Dimension 9200 (aka XPS 410)
E6600 2.4GHZ Core2Duo
4GB RAM
Galaxy GT 520 2GB video card
Samsung 830 256GB SSD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 1TB HD
375w PSU (Dell OEM)


   

[ScoobieKW]

It's possible, the hard drive isn't that big of a draw, but if your GPU is pushing the supply close to it's limits.

My bet is that it's an issue with your BIOS and the SATA setup. eSATA ports are most likely using a different chipset.

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine shows a draw under 200watts for your setup.

[spyder9]

Trim is enabled.  I checked that again last night.  My BIOS is up to date with the latest firmware. The factory setting is RAID ON and it allegedly triggers the AHCI for the SSD.  There is no actual BIOS setting for AHCI, for its hard coded on the Intel mobo. 

For the initial SSD configuration, I did go into regedit for the Local Machine setting and changed msahci's Start to 0, per instructions I found online.  Maybe I should switch that back to 3 and download Intel RST?   

Possible Remedys:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258159-32-solved-hangs-auto-detect-ahci-drive-help

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/vista-enterprise-desktop/an-ahci-dilemma-resolved-at-long-last/

http://andrewtrumper.blogspot.com/2008/10/ahci-and-freezes-during-startup-while.html

[Gordon]

run seatools on the 1tb drive

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

if short test passes run the long test.

before doing that use

http://hddscan.com/

and see if any of the smart attributes are triggered.  yes it's a new drive but seagates have gone to shit over the last number of years.

[spyder9]

I'll try it.  I doubt its the drive.  It functions perfectly normal in the esata enclosure.

 

[Gordon]

once it boots and sees the drive what does it say in disk management?  NOT device manager but disk management?  have you successfully initialized the disk and formatted it?

[spyder9]

once it boots and sees the drive what does it say in disk management?  NOT device manager but disk management?  have you successfully initialized the disk and formatted it?

When I first installed it, I successfully initialized the drive and formatted it.  Only recently, has the BIOS had a hard time recognizing it.   

In Disk Management, when its' in the esata enclosure, its identified as a healthy partition.

I think my problem is the AHCI in BIOS.

[Gordon]

if you set ahci in bios before installing windows there shouldn't be any problems related to that. 

edit:  saw the post above.  if it's in raid on or whatever and the ssd is working in ahci mode then all drives will work in achi mode.

[spyder9]

I'm gonna turn off msahci in Local machine (set to 3) and see if that works tonight.  I have no actual AHCI configuration for my drives in BIOS.  I have 2 choices - (1) RAID ON or (2) RAID Autodetect ATA.