Gigabyte UD5 Z68 board not detecting hard drives?

[night_2004]

Right in the middle of the the night my PC intermittently started to have RAID failures with drives dropping. Now this morning I wake up to a blue screen after an attempted rebuild event and the motherboard only detects drives maybe 1/5 boots. We aren't talking about one drive, but all four. When it is detected and I boot Acronis up to restore my data (because the RAID failures borked my data) from a server backup...well...after 10 minutes the drives drop out again.

Checking to see if cold or warm boots impact the chance to detect the drives too; I just started troubleshooting 15 minutes ago so I'm not entirely sure what the full story is.

I've got a solid power supply (Seasonic X750) and four WD drives (three of them relatively new). I recently had to replace my UPS (old and now dead) with a new APC unit but while troubleshooting I'm running the desktop off of a wall outlet.

The only drives the computer is detecting are my two optical drives on SATA0 and SATA1 (6Gbps ports). Going to try and switch around some cables in a minute here to see if the 3Gbps ports are the problem.

Not sure what other troubleshooting steps I can perform? I suspect the board is the problem here (but given Intel's P67 troubles in the past maybe there's a problem with Z68 I don't know about?) and not the drives or PSU. Not sure though.

 

[Ryoohki360]

Did you try filling the drives separately (putting a large files on them), not in RAID. Because if you're in RAID0, if there's one that is Borked, it will fail everytime. Look also of the RAID Rom can't read you're array thus it doesn't exist.

It's that, or the raid controller is busted.. but it's probably one of the HDD that is dead..

 

[Dan_D]

Z68 contains the "B3" revision to the chipset which resolves the SATA performance degredation issues. I've also found WD drives to be problematic in RAID arrays if you don't enable TLER in their firmware. Their Raid Edition drives do not have this problem because they already have the feature enabled. You may need to break the array and enable TLER on all the drives, then recreate it and restore. Hopefully that solves your problem.

I'm assuming you've checked your SATA cables, put a volt-meter to the power supply or at least checked the voltage monitor in the hardware monitor to ensure your PSU isn't doing something whacky.

 

[night_2004]

Did you try filling the drives separately (putting a large files on them), not in RAID. Because if you're in RAID0, if there's one that is Borked, it will fail everytime. Look also of the RAID Rom can't read you're array thus it doesn't exist.

It's that, or the raid controller is busted.. but it's probably one of the HDD that is dead..

I'll try resetting all the drives to non-RAID. At the initial splash screen when it is detecting drives (before handing it off to Intel's controller) it simply says that no drives on found on SATA2-5. It seems that it is less likely to happen with a cold boot but soon enough Acronis dumps on my anyway when it fails to write to a disk even if the drives are detected. Even if I try booting with only a single drive it fails to detect in BIOS.

Z68 contains the "B3" revision to the chipset which resolves the SATA performance degredation issues. I've also found WD drives to be problematic in RAID arrays if you don't enable TLER in their firmware. Their Raid Edition drives do not have this problem because they already have the feature enabled. You may need to break the array and enable TLER on all the drives, then recreate it and restore. Hopefully that solves your problem.

I'm assuming you've checked your SATA cables, put a volt-meter to the power supply or at least checked the voltage monitor in the hardware monitor to ensure your PSU isn't doing something whacky.

I'm running RAID1 so I thought the whole TLER thing wasn't even a big deal. That being said I'm pretty sure these new-ish drives don't support modifying that.

SATA cables are fine but now that you mention it I guess I'll have to break out my old multimeter so I'll do a continuity check while I'm at it. The motherboard is reading 1.248V Vcore, 1.1V Vtt, 3.363V for +3V, 12.22V for +12V, 4.9V for +5V, and 1.536V for +1.5V on the DDR3 sticks. Seems normal to me.

UPDATE: Two drives are working fine on the 6Gbps (one reboot so far okay)...trying to reset to non-RAID. Reset the PC and once again, not getting any of the four drives detected...
UPDATE v2: I'm getting a message about "ACHI BIOS not installed" during the POST phase where drives are being detected. Now it looks like I'm going to have to go read some manuals.

 

[night_2004]

Okay, problem solved. When I reseated the power cables for the hard drive (ModRight Molex to 4x SATA) I didn't think to check if the cable was plugged into the molex properly.

I went to check that plug and a wire snapped off the first SATA plug. Turns out the 12V wire was literally falling apart.