GGC-H20L SATA drive issues

Got new LG GGC-H20L today. Got some pretty serious problems with it. I first tried installing it on a Rosewill SIL SATA card. In this config, the motherboard freezes after POST and won't boot. The drive is correctly recognized by the card, but in BIOS it is listed in the boot menu with only a weird squiggley symbol. All other boot settings are nominal.

Testing the card with a hard drive, everything is fine. No boot issues and hard drive is recognized correctly, reads and writes well.

I pulled the LG off the card and plugged it into a motherboard SATA port, VIA VT8237R chipset controller on a Soltek K8TPro-939 motherboard. Now the board will boot, but Windows XP loading freezes at the little blue progress bar. Windows will boot into safe mode though, and the drive shows up OK. The chipset controller is running in IDE mode, and the 2 channels show up in DM with the vanilla MS drivers. Simply unplugging the drive from the MB allows Windows to load normally. While all this is happening, the Rosewell card is happily running a hard drive in non-RAID mode, so I'm sure the card is OK.

Seems to me like this drive may be FUBAR, but I'd love to hear any ideas.

Either that or none of your controllers work for this drive.

Yes, well, the SIL 3114 card is supposed to be fine for SATA drives, and it does recognize the drive correctly. It's acting like an IDE drive that's not jumpered right. The VT8237R is recognizing it correctly too, and it does boot in safe mode, or at least it did one time, and seemed to be showing up OK in DM.

The weird way that BIOS showed the drive while on the card got me to wondering if it's FUBAR.

So what are the other owners of this drive running it on?

Ah, your motherboard doesn't have Intel sata port, too bad. At this point, the only way to check the drive whether is fubar or not is to plug it in another motherboard with onboard intel ich sata controller.

I am running on a Asus p5k deluxe motherboard with Intel SATA plugged into one of the two optical drive SATA plugs, the other has my Samsung 203N on it.

Where are ya'll purchasing these drives from?

http://www.ncixus.com/products/index.php?sku=26553

~

Well, the drive is going back. No joy at all after hours of trying to eliminate potential conflicts with it. Disabling and unplugging everything, etc., etc.

What's odd is that Windows will load in safe mode, and the drive is detected. Since safe mode seems to run everything in PIO, it's impossible to say if it performs well in safe mode or not, but it does burn sort of. CPU runs high and buffer is all over the place.

Next question is whether to bother with trying another drive or give up. But if these drives will not run on the SIL controller, that's pretty important information.

That's to bad CDan, I am willing to bet it could be your SATA controller and not the drive itself.

Do you have any other SATA systems you can put it in? I know it would be a hassle but if you get another one and it does the same thing then I guess it most likely is your SATA controller that doesn't like the drive.

Sounds like the card is fine; with the tests CDAN has done it is most like the fact that the MB and Card; neither have an Intel based chipset.

I'd be more interested in hearing if someone else can duplicate issues with an SIL controller.
Trying hard not to let my Intel-hating side show, I'll just say that if the drive REQUIRES an Intel controller to work right, that's something that should be clearly disclosed up front.

Yea, the drive is so new right now. I was hoping that another member might have the same setup and could chime in here but there are only a very few of you with this drive so far.

lol don't worry CDan I was huge anti-Intel for years myself..

From what i have read this is a read only drive?

ROM for HD and BD, it has everything else, including lightscribe and RAM.

Yes Blu-ray and HD-DVD read only at 6x!, DVD +- 16x burning and 40x CD-R burning

edit: CDan was faster

Thanks guys. The price is still to rich for my wallet Be a nice drive to have though

Yes good for Playing/Ripping and DVD/CD speeds are fast!

Sorry to CDan. I didn't mean to be rude at all. As soon as i saw VIA i had a feeling no go but i guess you could RMA it and try another one.

You could review it at NE and tell others about your problem.

It's not a VIA issue, the drive doesn't work at all on the SIL controller. It actually comes closer to working on the VIA.

ok i understand better now thanks for the info. Anyway to plug it in an Intel based pc?

It's getting plugged into UPS and sent back. They'll probably plug it into a Wintel system and charge me a re-stocking fee because it works just fine.

FWIW, NCIXUS is totally worthless when RMAing hardware. It's been over a week since they received the drive back, and have still not verified if it's a bad drive or not. So I demanded and got a refund.

Now, I have to decide whether to try another drive or not. The Egg has them now. But I have a hunch that I'd be wasting my time.

Sure would be nice to know if anyone has one of these, or even a similar LG drive, running on a SIL controller card.

Does your SATA card works with SATA DVD burners?

If it was me I would buy another from a different vendor like you could from newegg.

Yes it will be a hastel and you might have to pay shipping to RMA it "again" if it doesn't work.

Or/and get a few different SATA cards try them with the drive and RMA the ones that don't work, but then again you will get socked with restocking and RMA shipping.

This early in the game you don't have many other options other than too wait for others to report