Seagate ST3300622AS-RK SATA HDD being detected as wrong Model HDD

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 14:29:15 -0800, JohnnyGFX
<JohnnyGFX@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I am in the process of helping a friend of mine with his Vista Home Premium
>(mine is working great).
>
>The problem is that it is detecting and loading drivers for his HDD that are
>wrong.
>
>Vista thinks the HDD is a ST330062 2AS SCSI HDD
>
>In reality the HDD is a ST3300622AS-RK (SATA) drive
>
>I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to get around this
>problem, but so far I have come up with no solution. Has anyone had this same
>problem and how did you manage to fix it.
>
>Motherboard is an Asus p4s800d-x
>
>After booting up with the drive plugged into the SATA slot, Vista shows it
>in the device manager and lists it as 'working properly' but no where else
>does it show (not in the explorer or in the Administrative Disk Management
>tools).
>
>I even had him try it in his secondary SATA connection and got the exact
>same result.
>
>Any help would be greatly appreciated and I will be happy to provide any
>additional details that might be necessary to find/fix the issue.

I've seen zillions of questions about SATA drives and Vista. Since I
was in the same boat, I'll share a simple solution. Go to BIOS,
carefully step through all the options and write down the setting as
they are now for SATA, then change to IDE. The SATA drive should work
fine under IDE mode.

Is this a new drive or one that has already been formatted? If it has
been formatted, and shows up in Device Manager but not anywhere else
AFTER you try changing to IDE mode, go back to Device Manager and
simply remove the drive. Do not physically remove the drive from the
system. Immediately reboot. Windows should reinstall the drive and say
it found new hardware right after it boot up.

Windows is a dumb beast and will often misname devices. I once had a
external drive case with a SATA drive inside. Windows saw it, but said
it had 0 capacity, which was strange since it was a formatted disk and
had about 50GB of data on it and worked fine if I plugged it into any
of the internal connectors. The kicker was every time I tried to
access it it when in the external encloser Windows said insert blank
disk. That's a pretty hard trick to do to a hard drive. Windows
thought it was one of those old zip disk drives. Simple fix, just
replaced the encloser with a different brand.

We tried that method as well. It's a it's a SIS 180 something or other
controller. I tried the latest version of the driver from Asus for the RAID
controller (which I think doubles as the SATA driver since I can't find an
actual SATA driver for the motherboard). I also tried the newer driver
directly from SIS. The drivers allegedly install correctly, but even after
deleting the drive from the Device Manager and rebooting, it was still
detected as a SCSI drive.

I'm not sitting in front of my friend's computer at the moment so I can't
confirm this, but he is telling me that the BIOS does not allow him to change
any settings other than SATA On Chip Controller Enabled or Disabled. I even
had him try the latest beta bios to see if that could help with the issue.

The thing is... this drive worked perfectly fine in XP. But now in Vista
it's being detected wrong, which leads me to believe that this is an issue
with Vista and it's SIS SATA drivers (or the ones available anyway).

My friend claimed that he went through every single option in his BIOS to
try and find a way to change the SATA to IDE mode, but was unable to find a
method to do it on the motherboard. I haven't been able to make it to his
house to look myself, but he absolutely insists that the option is not
anywhere.

So... needless to say, the problem still exists and we've been unable to
solve it so far.

"Adam Albright" wrote:

> I've seen zillions of questions about SATA drives and Vista. Since I
> was in the same boat, I'll share a simple solution. Go to BIOS,
> carefully step through all the options and write down the setting as
> they are now for SATA, then change to IDE. The SATA drive should work
> fine under IDE mode.
>
> Is this a new drive or one that has already been formatted? If it has
> been formatted, and shows up in Device Manager but not anywhere else
> AFTER you try changing to IDE mode, go back to Device Manager and
> simply remove the drive. Do not physically remove the drive from the
> system. Immediately reboot. Windows should reinstall the drive and say
> it found new hardware right after it boot up.
>
> Windows is a dumb beast and will often misname devices. I once had a
> external drive case with a SATA drive inside. Windows saw it, but said
> it had 0 capacity, which was strange since it was a formatted disk and
> had about 50GB of data on it and worked fine if I plugged it into any
> of the internal connectors. The kicker was every time I tried to
> access it it when in the external encloser Windows said insert blank
> disk. That's a pretty hard trick to do to a hard drive. Windows
> thought it was one of those old zip disk drives. Simple fix, just
> replaced the encloser with a different brand.
>
>
>