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    M980NU Hard Drive Bay 3 (or the One under the battery)

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011.

  1. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    Put in a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Drive in my system's bay 3 today and I couldn't format it because the system can't detect it.

    So I put it in an external case initiated and formatted it using that. I put it back into bay 3 and it still won't detect the hard drive.

    I remember trying to put in the second hard drive there last year too and had the same problem, so I put it into bay 2.

    Does bay 3 only work for RAID? Is there something I'm not doing right? Or is there something wrong with the port?

    As I've said in the owner's thread, I can't tell if it's loading from the bios either since it goes by too fast, aside from me not knowing which one it is.
     
    Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011
    #1
  2. moral hazard

    moral hazard Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Can you go into the bios and check if the sata port is enabled?
     
    moral hazard, Oct 14, 2011
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  3. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    Went into the Bios setup and the only time I saw sata mentioned there was choosing whether I want AHCI or RAID. The Bios firmware says it's version 1.00.06, haven't updated it since I bought it in December 2008, don't want to risk bricking the system since I've never updated a bios before.

    Or am I not looking in the right place?
     
    Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011
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  4. Support.3@XOTIC PC

    Support.3@XOTIC PC Company Representative

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    Is the third hard drive showing in the BIOS
     
    Support.3@XOTIC PC, Oct 14, 2011
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  5. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    Judging from the Boot portion of the Bios setup menu, no it's not.
     
    Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011
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  6. lzykocp1002

    lzykocp1002 Notebook Consultant

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    the 3rd bay under battery should detect the drive, sounds like you got issues.
     
    lzykocp1002, Oct 14, 2011
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  7. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    Is there anything else I could do to make sure?
     
    Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011
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  8. Support.3@XOTIC PC

    Support.3@XOTIC PC Company Representative

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    If you've tried multiple drives and none work that port could be bad. You can maybe try an BIOS update on it.
     
    Support.3@XOTIC PC, Oct 14, 2011
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  9. Anthony@MALIBAL

    Anthony@MALIBAL Company Representative

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    Do you have another machine to try the drive in? If you've tried other drives in that third bay and it hasn't worked with any of them, then you may have a faulty connection in that bay.
     
    Anthony@MALIBAL, Oct 14, 2011
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  10. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    I've successfully formatted the drive when I put it in an external enclosure.

    It also didn't work last year when I tried to put a second drive in there. Back then I just thought that I needed drives in bays 1 and 2 before it would detect 3.
     
    Bikuro, Oct 14, 2011
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  11. Bikuro

    Bikuro Notebook Geek

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    Checked the manual that was in the Driver CD and it had this to say about AHCI
    From my understanding, that means the maximum amount of drives when using AHCI is just 2.

    My new question is that if I set the system to raid, what will happen if I don't have any identical drives? The HDD's that I have are 250GB, 500GB and the 1TB. Can I have the system treat it as AHCI while I have the RAID option selected? Like say I don't define any drives in an array, will it still let me go about my business as if it's still on AHCI?
     
    Bikuro, Oct 15, 2011
    #11