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Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.
Problem description: So I recently built a nice system for a family member. I ordered an SSD to boot off of and a 4TB drive for everything else. All of this was ordered off new egg. The first drive that came, I could not format it. I went to disk management and would try to format it to GRT (Because its a much bigger drive) and it would say there was an IO failure. I tried looking up the error and only really found that it could mean a million different things including but not limited to the drive being dead. So, since the drive is a seagate, I downloaed and burned the seagate diagnostics to a boot disk, booted the computer to the disk, and ran a test against the drive. It immediately failed with an error code (That from googling provided zero results) and said that the drive was toast. So I RMA'd the drive and ordered a replacement. Well the replacement is here and its the exact same thing. I am wondering before I return this, is there something I am doing that is just blatantly stupid, and is the drive perhaps perfectly fine?

Attempted fixes: Tried running seagate diagnostics against both drives and both told me the drive failed. Attempted formatting in both formats, both failed. Attempted tweaking some bios settings to no real change.

Recent changes: The who computer is brand new. Everything else works.

--

Operating system: Windows 7 Home premium

System specs: Asrock H97M, i5-4690, GTX 770, Corsair CX750M (power supply), SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256BW, and the drive in question is a Seagate ST4000DM000.

Location: California, USA

I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes

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Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Do you have the latest motherboard BIOS, Intel Chipset INF drivers, and Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers installed?

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Alereon posted:

Do you have the latest motherboard BIOS, Intel Chipset INF drivers, and Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers installed?

The bios and intel chipset INF drivers were updated to the latest. Trying to install the Rapid storage technology software and it throws an error saying its not supported by this platform. I still cannot format the hard drive.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
You found your problem, confirm that AHCI is enabled in the BIOS, that should then let you format the drive and install the drivers.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Alereon posted:

You found your problem, confirm that AHCI is enabled in the BIOS, that should then let you format the drive and install the drivers.

gently caress ok, so here is a weird problem, when I was first configuring bios I set it to IDE. If I set my storage devices to AHCI now my windows won't load. Will I have to reinstall windows?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
You can fix the AHCI issue by following these instructions, but running in IDE mode has caused severe performance loss to the SSD that you need to repair. To fix the SSD, after you get Windows up and running under AHCI with the Intel RST drivers, install the Samsung Magician software (from the Samsung website, not the disk it came with) and run the "Performance Optimization" wizard under the Disk Management section. DO NOT run the "OS Optimization" wizard under the System Management section, it makes a lot of stupid changes. Once this has run, let this system sit for a bit, then run the Windows Experience Index rater.

Don't forget to enable "RAPID Mode" under the Advanced Features menu after you reboot after the above, since that's the main reason Samsung SSDs are awesome!

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Alereon posted:

You can fix the AHCI issue by following these instructions, but running in IDE mode has caused severe performance loss to the SSD that you need to repair. To fix the SSD, after you get Windows up and running under AHCI with the Intel RST drivers, install the Samsung Magician software (from the Samsung website, not the disk it came with) and run the "Performance Optimization" wizard under the Disk Management section. DO NOT run the "OS Optimization" wizard under the System Management section, it makes a lot of stupid changes. Once this has run, let this system sit for a bit, then run the Windows Experience Index rater.

Don't forget to enable "RAPID Mode" under the Advanced Features menu after you reboot after the above, since that's the main reason Samsung SSDs are awesome!

So I ran the fix, changed the bios to Ahci and everything was running. I installed the rst drivers and it asked me to reboot. I did and now it hangs on the starting windows screen for a while and then the whole system resets and it says windows shut down improperly and asks me if I want to repair it. What went wrong?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
I have never seen that happen, I have followed that exact procedure several times without issue. Try booting into safe mode and uninstalling the RST drivers? If you can't get them to work they are not critical, you can use the Microsoft default drivers for a very slight performance loss.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Alereon posted:

I have never seen that happen, I have followed that exact procedure several times without issue. Try booting into safe mode and uninstalling the RST drivers? If you can't get them to work they are not critical, you can use the Microsoft default drivers for a very slight performance loss.

Even safe mode won't boot. I'm going to let system repair restore it, if that doesn't work I'll just reinstall windows, it's still a relatively new system with little data. It's just a pain in the rear end.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.
OK so I restored to before the AHCI fix, reinstalled the fix, set my storage to AHCI in bios, and ran it. Downloaded the software magician thing, but this time I did not install the RST. However I still cannot initalize the 4tb disk... saying I/O device error once more.

edit: The error is "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

Double edit: OK now this is weird, now my bootable seagate diagnostic is saying that it cannot find any controllers. So I can't even do a seagate test against the drive anymore. Furthermore my bios lists the drive as 4.1 TB but windows disk managament lists the unallocated drive as 128GB.

I'm at a loss here, I am thinking about just doing a whole new system install. I am not sure if it would even help though...

Knifegrab fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Aug 30, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
You are using 64-bit Windows right?

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Alereon posted:

You are using 64-bit Windows right?

Correct.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.
So I went ahead and did a clean install of windows. Surprise surprise when I installed the RST drivers it hung on boot. if I unplugged the drive in question though it no longer fails to boot, so my guess is, the drive is just bogus. I am not sure what else to do but RMA it again and go with an entirely different drive moving forward, seagate has lost my confidence.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Can you try the drive in another PC? A DOA drive from retail is one thing, but DOA direct from the warranty replacement servicer strikes me as much more unlikely. I'm concerned the problem could be with the motherboard.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Factory Factory posted:

Can you try the drive in another PC? A DOA drive from retail is one thing, but DOA direct from the warranty replacement servicer strikes me as much more unlikely. I'm concerned the problem could be with the motherboard.

I do not have another system here I can test unfortunately. However I did try swapping the cables from my ssd to my hdd and vice versus, each time the same issue and each time the ssd worked fine. So do you think it is just a general "my mobo is broken and doesn't like HDD's"?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
More along the lines of "Maybe a SATA port is broken or the SATA controller is busted in a way that isn't affecting that particular SSD but does/would affect other drives." Broken hard drives can certainly explain this, but it's weirder behavior than usual for a broken drive, and especially for two drives in a row, and especially for a drive fresh out of a warranty replacement center. It could also be a power supply making GBS threads out bad power along the chain that the hard drive is plugged into, instantly frying the controller of any drive you hook up to it.

Even plugging the drive into a USB - SATA dock or adapter would help diagnose this, as that would bypass the motherboard's SATA controller.

Knifegrab
Jul 30, 2014

Gadzooks! I'm terrified of this little child who is going to stab me with a knife. I must wrest the knife away from his control and therefore gain the upperhand.

Factory Factory posted:

More along the lines of "Maybe a SATA port is broken or the SATA controller is busted in a way that isn't affecting that particular SSD but does/would affect other drives." Broken hard drives can certainly explain this, but it's weirder behavior than usual for a broken drive, and especially for two drives in a row, and especially for a drive fresh out of a warranty replacement center. It could also be a power supply making GBS threads out bad power along the chain that the hard drive is plugged into, instantly frying the controller of any drive you hook up to it.

Even plugging the drive into a USB - SATA dock or adapter would help diagnose this, as that would bypass the motherboard's SATA controller.

Well when my new drive gets here, if the same thing happens again, I will try and get a USB cradle to diagnose. Thanks for the tips. I really hope this is not the case and its just a case of new egg being dumb.

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Zarc
Jul 25, 2014

Knifegrab posted:

Well when my new drive gets here, if the same thing happens again, I will try and get a USB cradle to diagnose. Thanks for the tips. I really hope this is not the case and its just a case of new egg being dumb.

Just be aware that the way most HD makers handle warranty is they send you a certified repaired drive and not a new drive.

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