Win XP Thinks SATA Hard Drive is SCSI

[powerman]

I've been using a SATA hard drive with Win XP for about two years. All of a sudden WIN XP thinks that this drive is SCSI. Its a Western Digital and it had HAWK in the name of it all of a sudden. Clicking properties showed that Win XP thinks its SCSI. The drive does have multiple partitions, but its not RAID or SCSI.

My board is NF7S with an Athalon XP 2500+ cpu.

I noticed that the drive had been clicking for a while but it still shows up in deice manager. I'm hoping that its not fried. This is my newest hard drive out of all four of them. I hav had some that worked for about 7 years now and this one had better not be killed after only two years. It shows up as just a disk drive. When drives have gone bad before, they didn't show up in the device manager.

I'm not really sure if this is a hardware or software problem. Any ideas for something to try? It had been working for a long time.

Thanks.

 

[Joe Average]

SATA controllers regularly are identified by most BIOS as a SCSI device, it's normal for that type of operation. As for why it didn't show up in the past as SCSI and did just recently, I can't say, but I know I have several machines around that will ID the SATA controller - especially if it's in AHCI mode - as a SCSI controller but it still works fine.

If you've had some hard drives last for 7 years without fail and are in use constantly, congrats, and consider yourself lucky. "New" doesn't mean perfect, and even 2 years is a long time in the lifespan of a mechanical device if it's powered up and functional close to 24/7 for the entire time. Hard drives die, period, there's nothing you or I can do about it. Considering the drive still appears in Device Manager, it seems as though it's still functional.

The advice would be go find the manufacturer's drive diagnostic software if they have some available and run the Quick/Short test on the drive - if that comes up clean, then run the Advanced/Long test on the drive (will take much much longer but if far more thorough). If that comes up fine as well then the drive is as functional as the diagnostic software can tell. It could be a glitch in the partition table structure that has made the partition(s) "disappear" which is something I have seen happen quite frequently over the past few years.

If your drive's manufacturer doesn't have a diagnostic utility (some don't), go to:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

and get the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test, same principle. It's a hard drive diagnostic utility but it works with any brand of drive. But if your manufacturer has one, use THEIRS first. If the drive is 2 years old it's probably still under warranty (most offer at least 3 years minimum). The proper utility would generate the RMA information they'd require to get the RMA code for a proper return and exchange.

Good luck...