Samsung hard drive problems with Abit AX8 motherboard
 

At almost 4 years old I decided it was time to replace my main system's 160 GB hard drive. So I purchased a Samsung 500 GB SATA II hard drive. I've since had to RMA it.

I had problems the first time around that made me think it was the drive. I installed Vista with no trouble, but then needed to install the service packs. SP1 started installing until it reached the point when it needed to restart the computer.

The computer restarted and this time it could not detect the hard drive. BIOS didn't see it. I figured it might be some wrong setting in BIOS so I reset it to defaults. No change. I tried different SATA cables and power cables on the power supply. Nothing.

I thought it was the drive that had failed and requested an RMA from Newegg. They accepted it almost immediatly. I sent the old hard drive in 2 weeks ago Friday via UPS and got the replacement this Friday.

So this morning I decided to try again. This time however the BIOS never detected the hard drive. I tried different SATA cables and still nothing.

Now this computer has an Abit AX8 motherboard, I built the PC myself in July 2005, with VIA K8T890 chipset. The old hard drive was SATA I. I've heard some motherboards had problems with newer hard drives but since I'd updated the BIOS I didn't think this would be a problem.

I put on a jumper anyway in different positions and didn't get anywhere.

I'm puzzeled why the first hard drive worked for a little while. And now the second doesn't at all.

I'd suspect the motherboard but:

In the two weeks between hard drives I put the old (150 GB) hard drive in and it worked fine.

The 30 days since the original purchase passed this Tuesday so I don't think I can RMA it again.

Thanks for your help.

I presume you tried different sata ports on the mainboard ?