Solved! Working HDD Not Showing in BIOS

[Collider]

Having a really weird issue where one of the hard drives is not showing up in BIOS when connected to onboard SATA port. The drive is working fine without any issues in another pc / motherboard, so I know the drive is good 100%. Using Gigabyte Z370XP SLI motherboard, the drive is a 2TB Samsung drive.

I tried swapping SATA ports to rule out possibility of a bad port, tested with other drives, all ports are fine. Removed all PCIE cards, updated BIOS, changed SATA cables - has not helped.

When I connect the same drive to a PCIE 1x SATA expansion card, the drive shows up fine, but will not show up when connected to motherboard directly on any of the 6 available SATA ports.

Never seen anything like this. Any advice on what to try next in attempt to resolve would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

[mikeymikec]

Is it the only SATA drive connected? Any other drives like M.2 connected? What about if you change SATA port modes (IDE/AHCI/RAID)?

Firmware update for HDD?

Does Gigabyte have a user forum, have you tried looking there to see if there are any similar known problems with the board?

That is certainly a weird little problem. My first thought was related to the 2TB figure, but that looks like a brand new board.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Do you happen to know, was the drive "shucked" from an External Desktop OEM enclosure at some point in its lifetime? There were some rumors swirling around that some of those drives (esp. Seagate *) had modified firmware on them, that prevent using them as an AHCI drive internally.

(*) Samsung's HDD division was bought by Seagate around the time of 2TB 3.5" HDDs.

 

[Collider]

This is a regular drive, not shucked.

Turned out to be a firmware issue. @mikeymikec thanks for mentioning firmware, that pointed me in right direction.

Turns out that this line of drives HD203WI had a bug in firmware where it would not work on some AMD chipsets and chipsets supporting Haswell and up. I was testing this on 2 separate x58 platforms so the problem did not surface.

Once I flashed to new firmware from Seagate, drive showed up properly. But I had to flash it inside a x58 system that recognized the drive, it would not flash on the new board.

Here are some links I found that helped me resolve this:
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/samsung-f3-and-f3eg-firmware-patchupdate-223631en/
http://fredsherbet.com/2014/05/upgr...nt-drives-hd203wi-and-hd204ui/comment-page-1/

 

[mikeymikec]

Glad you got it sorted. I wonder what the underlying reason for the bug is.