Hello All

I'm new here and I've got a funny problem and hope that some of the GURUs here will be able to help me out with it.

I've got a box of Hitachi Deskstar 83G drives, HDS728080PLAT20 to be exact. Iv'e got about 50 of them and would like to put them to use.

These drives were previously used in Linux headless network print controllers (Xerox) but when the motherboards or power supplies in the controllers failed Xerox scrapped the drive with it and we got to keep them.

The drives aren't recognized by the BIOS on a cold boot, the BIOS will read 0MB, 0Heads, 0 Cyl. It seems to know something is there but can't figure out what it is. I'll also mention that if I put my hand on the drive as the machine boots up I don't feel the drive spinning up.

I thought that FDISKing them might help so I took an install disk from Fedora 10 and put it in the CD, during the startup/rescue process by the Linux CD a command (ATA something but it flashes by really fast) seems to get sent to the drive and it then spins up. I can then see it under /dev/sda and can run FDISK on it and erase all of the old partitions etc. I did this and created a bootable FAT32 partition and wrote it to the disk and re-booted (warm) by exiting the Linux rescue shell.

On warm boot the BIOS recognized the hard drive, it knew the model number and all the proper stats, I thought I had fixed it.

Then I powered down the computer and did another cold boot and it went back to not being recognized again.

I have already made sure that the jumpers are not set to power up in standby and yet that seems to be what the problem is. Is there something I can do to the drive to force it to spin up during a cold boot? I've got FTool and DFT (drive fitness test) from the Hitachi site but I'm not familiar enough with how the internals of drives work to know what to look for or change.

JayArr

PS, I've tried it on two different motherboards with the same result and I've tried about 6 different drives with the same result so it's not just one of them and it's not my computer.

Try disabling PUIS using HDAT2:

http://www.hdat2.com/

User's Manual HDAT2 v4.6:

http://www.hdat2.com/files/hdat2en_v11.pdf

Thank You fzabkar!

That "sort of" worked.

I made the CD from your site but it didn't recognize the drive (because PUIS was set)

Which makes it a great piece of software to set PUIS but not 100% functional at "unsetting " it.

The workaround for me was to start up the computer with the Linux startup CD and once the drive spins up eject the linux disk and warm boot the computer with the HDAT2 CD. The hard drive is recognized properly by both the BIOS and HDAT2 after the warm boot and I can then use HDAT to turn off PUIS.

Now when I cold boot that drive it is recognized by BIOS - SUCCESS!

Thank You so much!

JayArr

Your workaround will no doubt be very tedious for 50 drives. :-(

Instead try the CONFIG command in MHDD:

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

AFAIK, MHDD can see functional drives that are not detected by the BIOS because it does not rely on BIOS routines.