Solved GA-H67M-D2-B3: System Hangs with Old SATA Hard Drives

Hello All,

I have a Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2-B3 (rev. 1.0) LGA1155 mobo with an Intel Pentium G620 dual-core CPU installed (F7 BIOS). I'm using a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD as my main OS drive. Win7 64-bit is installed and running fine. I have a couple of old 1st gen. SATA hard drives I want to also use with this system. Both are old-school Maxtor 160GB drives (will only use for storage). When I have them plugged in, the system boots up fine and recognizes the drives and assigns drive letters accordingly. After a certain time, the HDD busy light goes solid and the system becomes unresponsive. It doesn't matter which old Maxtor drive I have plugged in, this happens with one or both plugged in. I can unplug them with the PC on and the system operates as normal again. And with just my SSD plugged in, this doesn't happen at all. Could this be an issue with drive indexing within Win7 for the old drives or having the SATA interface configured as AHCI? I'm using the SATA 3 GB/s ports for everything. Any feedback/suggestions on what I could do to fix this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Other details: 8GB DDR3 GSkill memory installed; using onboard Intel HD graphics

Some new information I just learned: whenever I run windows update, I notice that on one of the non-system Maxtor drives, temporary install folders are being created and the update hangs. Why wouldn't those be created on the system drive? Just wondering if that has something to do with it. Did a file path get messed up or something?

Have you checked for any firmware updates for those hard drives? Is there any thing on the hard drives? What file system are the hard drives using...FAT 32 or NTFS?

Are those Sata I or Sata II drives by chance? If those are Sata I type drives they are well past their time. You would be far better off grabbing a deal on a larger Sata II even S3 drive to dedicate as a main storage drive.

Please post back a screenshot of your maximized Disk Management drive map and listings:

1. Type Disk Management in Start rb: Search box.
2. Open Disk Mgmt. window and maximize it.
3. Type Snipping Tool in Start Search box.
4. Open Snipping Tool, choose Rectangular Snip, click New, draw a box around full drive map and all listings.
5, Save Snip, attach using paper clip in Reply Box.

Tell us what is on each partition.

Sometimes stray boot code can interfere if the non-System HD's are not wiped first. Back up the files first and run Diskpart Clean Command.

Thanks for the replies all.

Night Hawk said:

Are those Sata I or Sata II drives by chance? If those are Sata I type drives they are well past their time. You would be far better off grabbing a deal on a larger Sata II even S3 drive to dedicate as a main storage drive.

Click to expand...

I'm going to have to chalk this up to old 1st gen. SATA drives not playing nice with new hardware (as Night Hawk mentioned). I swapped out the two old drives for a newer 80GB (most likely SATA II) I had laying around and the problem went away. Just odd that it happens with both the drives as opposed to just one of them. Though they are identical in model and age. Thanks again for the quick responses and suggestions. Much appreciated.

If those were Sata I they tended to be problematic even on older boards at times. The Sata IIs were the much needed improvement that came about and is still a good choice for a main storage drive. The larger the better for having that extra drive space to consider for things like your backups and even a system image or two.