Trouble with 1TB Samsung SATA

[dipstik]

I've got a Samsung HD103UJ that comes up in the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Bios as a 33MB drive, and in the XP SP3 disk manager as a 7.88GB RAW partition. I dont think it matters but ive got a Q6700, 2x2GB Corsair XMS2 800Mhz ram and an EVGA 8800GT. I have had the drive for maybe a year and I was able to watch videos off of the drive earlier today. I still had about 300gigs free on the drive. I've tried doing an AHCI thing, but I nver installed those drivers and the botup fails when I try that, and the AHCI initilization sequence says that device something failed (quick prompt). I am about to try some of the samsung disk utilities and hope that it will shift some bits around to get the bios to see a TB drive.

Any help or experience?

[Russell]

Samsung’s ES tool incorrectly reports bad sectors on the their OWN HDD… dont worry about it. They dont exist.
As for the drive, re-intialize it after doing the bios update. (SPC_75 had the same issues as you, and we fixed them all long ago).
Make sure to install in ahci mode or it will run at 8MB/s.
Enjoy your batshit fast hdd

control panel, admin tools, computer management, storage, disk management, select the 1Tb drive, right click, and i believe there hould simply be an initialize disk option.

[Hardwareman]

There are a few options available to you:

1. Slipstream the ACHI drivers into Windows XP. For that you'll need a tool called nLite.
   
   
2. If your computer has a floppy disk drive, then copy the ACHI drivers onto a blank disk. When XP starts to load off the CD you'll see a message at the bottom of the screen telling you that you can press F6 to load additional drivers. Press F6 and follow the onscreen instructions.
   
   
3. Change your BIOS back to IDE and install XP as normal. When you reboot put a slipstreamed version of XP (one with the ACHI drivers loaded) into your CD drive and boot from the CD. Use the [R]epair option and this will load the ACHI drivers onto your system.
   
   
4. Alternatively, install Vista as this has ACHI support built in.

[Maxforu]

Switching to AHCI mode is beneficial, but if doing so after Windows XP is already installed, then use a different controller for the OS drive, unless you fancy doing a repair install.

As a quick test, have you tried timing copies to and from the hard drive using regular Windows Explorer? Use a file that's at least 1GB. 5GB or bigger might be better.

[dipstik]

Thanks everyone.

Russel: I dont see an option to initialize the disk in the manager anywhere. Is there any way to install the AHCI drivers like a hotfix?

Hardwareman: How would I slipstream the drivers into XP? I got nlite, but I have yet to find the drivers for AHCI

maxforu: I cant use the hard drive in any mode so far. The 7.88GB raw partition is unusable and unformated, and I dont wish to mess with the partition in hopes of getting my data back. I have another installation of windows on an IDE drive I can mess with but I am trying to find AHCI drivers and figure out the slipstream thing.

I found this: http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831 , but when i tried to install it after copying the sys file to the driver folder and loading the reg and restarting it said I didnt have the hardware needed... but thats because I could not start my machine with AHCI turned on and have it see the HDD with XP installed.

I should mention that My OS installed on a sata drive, but not the one thats failing.

I was able to flash my bios with a usb, but it still sees the drive as 33MB and says verify failed at the end of the AHCI loading screen.