Albatron PX865PEC Pro and WD 36GB Raptor SATA drive

as some of you may know, i recently tried to add a 36GB Raptor to my system which was then running an Albatron PX865PEC Pro board.

the board comes with onboard SATA connectors and i previously had a SATA Maxtor 320GB connected to it with no problems at all, but the Raptor doesn't seem to be recognized by the board. it doesn't even come up in the bios screen.

i've replaced the board for an Intel D865GBF and everything works fine. i just can't figure out why it wouldn't work on the Albatron board even after updating to the latest bios available.

i don't think i'll be spending a lot of time troubleshooting the Albatron board, but if anyone has this same motherboard and a 36GB Raptor, i'd be curious to learn how you got them working together. it's got me stumped! 

well, you know i wasn't just going to give up on this thing LOL

today i decided to get to the bottom of it. this time however, i have moved all my email and applications over to my spare PC so that i can still work while i figure this one out.

so i replaced the motherboard this afternoon. by "replaced" i mean i went back to the Albatron PX865PEC Pro motherboard. this time i unplugged everything and i just had the bare essentials to boot the system with... same problem. the 36GB raptor is just not recognized by this board.

mind you, it's the same chipset and supposedly the same sata controller as the Intel D865GBF motherboard (where the drive works just fine), so i did a bit of research and i could only find 1 website with info on this issue: http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?t=118201

the link describes the exact same problem that i'm having. it seems to be related to WD SATA hard drives combined with the ICH5 intel chipset, although, as i have just proven, in my case it seems to be BIOS related and unfortunately Albatron don't have any updated BIOS for my motherboard. i'm already running the latest BIOS.

so now that i know that this is a known issue, i'm planning to get a SATA PCI card and boot the raptor off it. hopefully that will work.

looking further into it, Intel's ICH5 controller is not even listed on WD's compatibility list http://www.westerndigital.com/en/library/sata/2579-701189.pdf

i might just forget about the raptor and use another brand as a boot drive.

Thanks for the update! That's certainly a useful piece of info and good to know.