Seagate sata2 problems

[Gman15]

hi guys.
about 2 months ago i purchased a Seagate 80gig sata2 drive.it was mainly for portable Sata bay,then i realised that this drive was 10mbps faster than my WD 160sata2.the problem is the drive just does not work properly out of the portable bay,it gives all kinds of errors,wont install XP,then my onboard wasnt working,it didnt install the nf4 chipset drivers right,but,when i put the drive back in its bay,and formatted and reinstalled,XP ran fine.this drive has no molex connector,just a sata connectors.is this normal,as ive tried 2 different pc`s,with different psu`s,same problem.Also,i have to disable the NCQ command,or its just not usable in Windows.

Thanks.

[Got EpOx]

Some drives have a molex connector aswell as a standard SATA power connector, this is to gain more power during spin up and intensive disk reading/writing. How many HDD's do you have and what is the power rating of your PSU?

[Favu]

Yeah Got EpOx is right - other drives usually have Molex connectors incase your PSU doesn't have dedicated SATA power connectors.

Can you just clarify what you mean by "portable bay" ?

[Gman15]

its a 500watt KME psu,and portable bay is just that,portable harddrive housing,like a usb portable drive,but this 1 is just sata,not usb.this is the only drive i have in my rig.

[Áedán]

How do you mean it's a portable hard disk housing? Like you have a 3.5" SATA drive inside, and it hooks up to USB? If it hooks up to SATA, is it SATA 3Gb/s compliant? It is possible that the device is causing corruption on the SATA bus, which is causing problems with the SATA drive.

It's not that unusual for a SATA hard disk not to have a molex connector. You cannot "hotswap" a drive with a molex connector, and the SATA power connector is designed to handle 3.3V, 5V and 12V across it's 15 power pins.

[Gman15]

hmmm...ok.but when i put the drive in its portable bay using external power source,its fine,with the exact same drivers,with no reboots or lockups.so it could be a power supply issue of sorts.i was reading on another forum that the Seagate sata2 drives might need a firmware upgrade to be 100% compatible with nf4 chipset.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=10755
the link to that forum.

[Áedán]

Sorry - I misread your post in that it appeared you were trying to install XP via the portable bay. Presumably the bay is USB based?

If there is a firmware update to solve potential compatibility problems, then it would make sense to see if that fixes your issues.

[Gman15]

i think u are not understanding what im saying,the drive is a sata drive with a sata connection to my pc via a pci-sata card,thus it comes up as a normal sata in bios,thats y i can install XP on it,its not ur regular usb connection drive.thanks Aedan,btw,my sons name is Aidan as well.cheers.

[Gman15]

hi guys,my problem is solved,i bought a new Psu and loaded the NF4 6.85 drivers,and the drive is as stable as ever,and also my nforce network controller is working now as well.thanks for all your help guys.cheers.

[Got EpOx]

no probs, anytime dude.

[Gman15]

thanks guys.i have 1 more question though,the WD160 sata2 drive`s mbr is set to boot from the 131gig partition,the guy i bought it from somehow partitioned the drive to be 131gigs for C: and the rest for D:i tried clearing the mbr so i can start over and make the C: 30 gigs and the rest for D:,but no such luck,as fdisk only picks up the 20gig and not the whole drive.is there any way i can clear the mbr without doing any damage to the disk.thanks.