Asus P5B Mobo and Sata II Drive problem

[rareair04]

Hi Gang,

I am having a nightmare of a time with my pc and hope someone can point me in the right direction.

First the kit I got:-

I have a Asus P5B mobo running a Pentium D processor with 3GB ram on the Vista platform.

The problem I am having is that I had to replace my faulty WD 500GB drive with a new one. When I installed this it took forever to format and then I ran a quick smart test and came back as failed. I did a scandisk and it reported back as having bad sectors. Strange as it was a brand new drive. I sent it back and got another one of the same. Again, same problem, quick smart test error. Thinking that it was a batch problem with WD I sent that back and got a Seagate one.

Installed that last night, formatted it within Windows Disk Manager, and hey presto, Seagate's diagnostic tool reports a smart test error.

I cant see what I am doing wrong here, and would welcome any input. Is the mobo starting to display a fault and need replacing? or am I just not installing it properly?

I have swapped other drives in the mobo before and they have worked without any hitch.

Many Thanks

[DARKSCORPION]

hey man i was wondering if u check before the compatibility of ur mobo with sata2, i read before that sometimes this drives are kinda picky with the devices they want to work well along the path.
im not really familiar working with this hds so maybe what i tell u don't help u much but lets try to find the issue.
1)possible reasons why all ur hds are doing or giving the same final result test.

a) mobo incompatible with sata2 or some sort of malfunction ?check with the manufacture company see if they got some information.
b) software? did u try to made a new partition under msdos, and use another kinda of software to test ur drives? try not to run test software from windows try to do it from msdos (don't pay attention if u are allrdy did it)
c)memory ram. sometimes i see faulty memory ram affecting another devices and trust me computer do weird things sometimes things that u don't even would think about it at that moment.(this is a remotely option u never know try to run the test with different memory ram or try to do a barebone test. let me know if any of this helped u.

[Paul Komski]

SMART results are not the easiest to interpret if that is what you are running e.g. "Most SMART utilities do not know what the Seagate self test is (http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/hard-drive-support/61067-seagate-hard-drive-seatools-error.html)".

I would run Seatools for DOS (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools) from a boot floppy or CD rather than any Windows version of a Drive Checking utility if there are any odd issues like you seem to be having. Your board supports SATA 3.0 (so called SATA II) so that really shouldn't be an issue.

To have three drives with significant surface errors is just too much of a coincidence. All drives develop a number of bad sectors (yes even factory delivered drives and even while still at the factory) and these are remapped using SMART technology all the time; that is a normal state of affairs.

It is certainly true that bad RAM can cause all sorts of oddities so by all means try things with just one stick at a time.

[jlreich]

Don't forget to try a new data cable. Also try another SATA port on the mobo.