Odd SATA port situation with Dell Inspiron 531

[Fred Forsythe]

My brother has a Dell Inspiron 531 which recently had the original SATA HDD begin to make noise & otherwise act as though it was about to fail. He ordered a new HDD, installed it in the same port as the old one (0, I think), and reloaded the OS (Vista Home Premium) on the new drive. But when he attempted to install the still-working old HDD to copy over his various files, the PC would not recognize it. Anywhere. Not in WE, not in Disk Management, and not in BIOS. The MOBO (Asus proprietary for Dell, I think) has 4 SATA ports. As delivered, 0 was the HDD, 1 was DVD, the other 2 were unused. He found that by connecting the old HDD to SATA 1 (where the DVD was installed by Dell), it appeared in WE etc. and could be accessed normally, BUT moving the DVD to 2 or 3, IT (the DVD drive) would then disappear! Someone on a Dell forum told him the MOBO simply will not recognize more than 2 SATA devices, and only if they are in 0 & 1. Why would the board come with 4 SATA ports, yet only have 2 be usable? Anyone heard of this with this PC, or otherwise? Any idea how he might be able to activate the other 2 ports?

TIA

Fred

[Paul Komski]

Regardless of ports 2 and 3 if the original is seen in 0 and the new one is not then either the hard drive is bad or possibly the hardware cannot recognise the newer, probably faster, SATA drive. These faster drives normally come with a jumper to drop them back to the earlier slower speed.

There are three different interfaces
3.1 SATA revision 1.0 (SATA 1.5 Gbit/s)
3.2 SATA revision 2.0 (SATA 3 Gbit/s)
3.3 SATA revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s)

If the ports are physically there but not seen in the BIOS I would guess there is another BIOS setting that can enable/disable them or change their status from SATA to IDE Emulation or Similar. Asus themselves generally have very good support if you knew the model of the board. Maybe Belarc could suss it out.

EDIT: Sorry I see that it is just the ports 2 and 3 problem that you were enquiring about so forget about the different versions and scrutinise the BIOS very carefully. Sometimes such areas can be hard to find without a manual.

[LochLomonder]

Fred,

I know in the BIOS of some of the older Dells, you could actual enable/disable specific SATA connections. Just because the power and comms cords are plugged in to the motherboard, it doesn't mean it'll actually read the drive.

I can't remember the exact placement in the menu off the top of my head, but there should be a list of SATA ports (0,1,2,3, etc.) in the BIOS and the ones for his working HDD and CD/DVD drive will be enabled. I would suggest turning them all on so he can see if the drive is recognised, and it'll tell him what's connected once the port is "made live". After that, he can disable the unused ports.

[Fred Forsythe]

My brother sent me a screen pick of the BIOS, all the SATA ports are grayed out/can't be altered. Any way that can be changed?

Thanks for the replies.

[LochLomonder]

Fred,

Tell your brother to go into the BIOS, click on Advanced, Integrated Peripherals, and look for Serial-ATA Configuration.

Set the controller to SATA 1 +2, save the settings, and then exit BIOS. When it's going to boot up, tell him to enter the BIOS setup again and see if the drive is now being recognised. If it's not, I would say check all the cabling and ensure it's attached securely to both the motherboard and the drive. If so, I would also recommend checking the SATA data cable and swapping it with a known working cable, since there's a possibility it's defective.

[Paul Komski]

The Manual for this PC only gives examples of some of the BIOS setup parameters but it does indicate that RAID is supported by this motherboard. So, along the lines that lochlomonder has already indicated under the advanced settings, there are likely to be settings somewhere to configure/enable RAID and/or SATA and/or Hard Drives or something similar. That is where concentration of effort should be applied.

The fact that the parameters for the recognised drives are greyed in the pic is often the case nowadays with only autodetected information for enabled ports being displayed. If by any chance RAID has been configured for ports 2 and 3 there is likely to be another hot-key during startup to enter the RAID's own BIOS. In such a case a good drive would not show in the SATA list but would appear in the RAID list.

Edit
On further reading:
RAID is only supported by software on Windows Vista. However the underlying SATA drives must be properly configured in the normal BIOS setup Advanced area.

[Buddha9596]

Fred's brother here. I tried the suggestion to enable the SATA 1+2. After doing so, the drives all show in the configuration screen.

The only problem now is that if anything is connected to SATA 2, I get the attached BSOD right after Windows loads.

If the SATA 1=2 is enabled but nothing is connected to SATA 2 all is OK. The extra HDD and the DVD drives both work OK in SATA 1 with either configuration.

[Paul Komski]

It sounds as if the additional SATAs have been configured differently from those on Ports 0 and 1. There are three basic potential settings: RAID, SATA in AHCI mode or SATA running in an IDE or PATA emulation mode. All four ports should ideally be set in the same mode and thus be using the same set of drivers in Windows.

An indication that this is a drivers issue might be to see if you can get into the system in SafeMode OK (= no BSOD) with three of the four ports in use.