Howdy Gents,

New guy here.

I have a recently bought 3TB Seagate (ST3000DM001) that whenever I boot my computer with it plugged in, it causes the BIOS to freeze (BIOS does POST). It didn't used to do this.. I had it plugged in and working for a good week or two and then one day windows kernel panicked and now it doesn't work..

I CAN however plug the drive into a SATA to USB and read it just fine on windows.

I had a fellow IT friend tell me to try to flash the latest firmware to the drive, however I can't even get the computer to get the the boot selector without unplugging the drive in question.

I'm going to try to flash the firmware on a different computer tomorrow to see if I have any luck, but I doubt it.

Any advice? Has anyone had this issue before? I've googled around quite a bit, but found nothing like this.

Advice is that if the drive works SATA-USB, then make sure you have all of your data off it, or copied at least. You can never assume your data will survive a HDD Firmware update. But I guess it should be ok to do it, though have you seen any reports of this model that display this behaviour that has been fixed with a firmware update? Is an update available for this drive?

Alright, so I stick it in an old dell desktop at my work. It makes it past the bios just fine. I found out that the firmware file I have is for an older generation and that there currently no update available.

I boot the computer up, shows up in the OS, tests perfectly fine.

I'm going to try to reflash the mobo bios and see if that helps, however the sata ports/controller are working just fine with other drives..

you could try re-install the latest chipset drivers for your mobo, and any storage drivers like intel rapid storage.

I would have suggested changing the ide mode to "legacy", not ahci but you said it previously was working ok.

A PC BIOS update shouldn't hurt, maybe before that maybe reset the BIOS to default and see if that recovers functionality.

Installed latest chipset drivers. Re-installed Intel Rapid Storage. Reflashed BIOS, reset BIOS.

Still hanging on the bios screen. I'm lost. I have no clue what to do..

update motherboard bios. If too old an update for modern drives buy a drive controller card and use that- it will have higher level drive support and is inexpensive.

Is the 3TB drive a data drive or the OS drive?

If you disconnect all other SATA drives, does the machine still fail to POST?

Is the SATA port a 6Gbps port? If so, does the motherboard also have 3Gbps ports, and have you tried these?

Do you have an SSD as an OS drive?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Mobo Bios has been updated and reset. It is a Gigabyte Z87-D3HP so it's using the latest Intel Z87 chipset and it has a 4770K in it.



The 3TB is a data drive.

If I disconnect all other SATA drives, it still fails to boot. I unplug the 3TB and it boots just fine.

All the sata ports are 6Gbps and all cords are rated at 6Gbps.

I do indeed have an SSD as an OS drive.

If it had worked for sometimes, would not firmware issue (Drive or Computer) be ruled out ?

I know it may not be easy to do, but it would be a good test to find a similar drive, but as close to the problem drive you can get, and try that. That could tell you if it is either the drive itself or the PC where the issue lies.

either your drive has got an issue or it is the windows storage driver system (I am grouping hardware, chipset, storage drivers together here).

can you run the Seagate tools from Seagate website on the drive when it is in a PC that works it?

once again, you have got everything that matters off it?

cheers

As much as I wish that I could get everything off of it, I am not in the financial position currently to order another drive of such capacity at this time.

I have not tried running seagate tools yet, but I should be able to do this tomorrow with the dos version of said tools on an old dell at work.

Thanks again for helping me with this guys.

As for testing a similar drive, I do have a 1 TB and 500GB WD 7200RPM SATA III drives in there that work just fine.. not sure how similar you are talking, but that's about as good as I got currently.

Alright. Here is a final update for you all. I bought another 3TB, except it's a WD this time (forget Seagate.. bleh). Transferred all my data over and reinitialized the disk. I then installed the Seagate in the SATA port again.. booted. Set the Seagate to software RAID 1 with the WD. All seems to be well now.

Glad you got it working. Sometimes better to have it working and forget it, can tend to drive you mad these random weird ones