Icybox IB-554SSK internal hot-swap not recognising brand new drive?

[Jaybee]

Hi all,

My third 3XS machine, an i7 920, Asus P6T Deluxe build is now 18 months old but still performing wonderfully. When I had her built I specified an Icybox / IB-554SSK / 4x3.5 inch SAS / SATA / Internal Hard Drive Enclosure and three 1TB WD Caviar Black drives for data storage (I use an SSD for OS and programs) leaving one IcyBox bay empty for future expansion. The drives are NOT in any sort of RAID config at all, just three separate drives.

I now want to use the (until now empty) 4th drive bay for even more data storage so recently purchased a WD WD20EARX 2TB SATA 64MB Caviar Green drive to go in there.

Here's the problem:

I've popped out the empty carrier and mounted the drive with the four spare IcyBox screws I had in my 3XS post-build bits n bobs box! But, when I push the new bay back in the drive is not recognised. By not recognised I mean its as if there's no power to it. It's completely dead. The four Icybox bays each have two lights, blue for "power" and green for "data is moving about". Neither light up. Its as if there is no drive in the bay at all. The bay door shuts as normal without having to be forced etc. I'm sure I have it seated right.

I can't see it listed in the BIOS either before or after a reboot.

I tried to troubleshoot by putting one of the three known to be working drives into the previously empty bay 4 and then allis fine with bay 4, it lights up and the existing drive works fine in there. So then I put the new WD 2TB drive into bay 3 but it gives the same dead "no lights" result as it does in bay 4. Same if it's in bay 1 or 2. The new WD drive won't light up in any of the bays.

I've never had a hot-swappable drive bay arrangement before (so wasn't sure what to expect) but I would have thought on this newish system the new drive should at least be recognised on a reboot and power up so I could go into Disk Management on Win7 x64 and format or partition it etc?? Is there anything I need to do in BIOS? Shouldn't the IcyBox just detect I've slotted a new drive in the spare bay and away we go?

Confirming the 4th bay works with one of the existing 1TB Caviars in it leads me to believe that the IcyBox unit is fine and new 2TB Caviar may be DoA? Unless I'm doing something seriously wrong. Have I missed anything crucial?

The 3XS build was only with the 3 x 1TB Caviar Black drives I specified at the time so I'm wondering if I need to "tell" the BIOS to find the new 4th WD drive that's dead as a dodo in bay 4?

Would be grateful for any ideas please before asking to RMA the drive as dead. I didn't buy the drive from Scan as I live in France now and unfortunately you don't deliver here

Another test I've done is to try leaving the current working bay 3 drive out completely and put the new WD drive into that bay so keeping only three bays full (in case it was doing some sort of only three at any one time trick) but still no joy, no lights, no sound, nothing from the WD.

As another check I took an old (but working) Seagate 300Gb SATA (1?) drive and put that into the carrier and into bay 4 and this is "dead" too, no lights for power etc. Triple checked by putting a 75Gb WD Raptor (again known working) in there and still no joy. No lights at all and of course, nothing recognised in BIOS or Windows.

So at first I thought the new WD 2TB was DoA, but now I'm leaning towards me having to do something in the BIOS to tell the motherboard to recognise it...? Heeeelp! I'm not too bad with software, but not very confident with hardware.

Happy New Year to all, and thanks in advance, hope someone can suggest a fix...

Jaybee

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Jaybee

Have you checked in Disk Management if the disk is shown as unallocated?

Right Click Computer - Disk Management
If its not initialised it will ask to be Initialised and Formatted as Windows wont see or cant use this drive until it has been

It depends on what the Bios is set to as to if it will show in the bios as well so if its IDE or AHCI it will show and if set as Raid (even as seperate drives it could be set to Raid) the drive wont show in the bio but will show in the Raid bios

If none of the above work and the drive still wont detect it will need an RMA

Regards

Ben

[Jaybee]

Hi Ben

Thanks for the quick reply!

No, it's not showing up at all in Disk Management, or the BIOS, or even powering up in any of the IcyBox slots. Looks very much like a dead drive but if so, also wondering why my other two (old Sata 1 but known to be working) SATA drives don't work in any of the IcyBox slots either?

Any ideas? I want to be absolutely sure it's not some setting I need to enable before I RMA back to Western Digital.

Cheers

Jaybee

[Jaybee]

This problem is now SOLVED

SUCCESS!!! Got some help on another forum and it led to the solution. To help anyone else in a similar head-scratching situation here's what happened.

I was asked to go into BIOS and check the status of the drives detected and see if all drives were reporting:

Type=Auto
LBA/Large Mode=Auto
Block(Multi-Sector Transfer) M= Auto
PIO Mode=Auto
DMA Mode=Auto
SMART Monitoring=Auto

All settings were exactly as above except "Sata 5" which just showed "Not detected".

I then opened up the case to see if I could connect the new drive to an existing SATA connector from the IcyBox bays to see if it would spin up and thus eliminating the IcyBox from the loop. The build was as expected, very very neat and all cabling was beautifully tied off so there was no slack. Also there was no spare SATA power connector to connect to the drive as the IcyBox uses Molex into it's casing to supply all four bays.

At this point I thought I'd take some pics of where the SATA leads connected to the Motherboard as per a member's suggestion to see where the thing actually connected to! On looking at the photo, in among the nest of cables I saw a spare SATA socket labelled "Sata 5".... I stuck my head in the case and looked at the back of the IcyBox. It has slots for four SATA cables, one for each bay presumably, and lo and behold the 4th bay one was empty.

This is the "magic" part. The IcyBox seems to work across all four bays even though only three cables were ever connected....! No wonder this was hard to troubleshoot from outside.

Went to my box of bits left over from the build and found a SATA cable. Plugged one end into "SATA 5" on the Mobo and one into HDD4 Primary on the IcyBox and booted into BIOS....

WD 2TB detected first time!

Saved and exited and into Windows where it asked me to initialise. Found it in Disk Management, formatted, tested and she's now working fine. Still no lights from the IcyBox though in that particular bay, I think that's a jumper setting somewhere but hey, it's working and I know it's in there...

I guess when I specced the build the 4th bay wasn't connected because I didn't fill it with a drive, which is disappointing as I've lost a whole day and raised about £50 for the swear-box fund thinking I had a dead drive. Would have thought you'd build it with all four enabled even though it only had three drives in to start off, I just built myself in some expansion or so I thought.... . Ah well... lesson learned. Next build I get you to do I'll load everything up from the off...!

Still love this machine to bits and it's a real workhorse. Glad we got there in the end. Off to backup some more data...

Happy New Year all....

Jaybee