Vista - seagate barracuda / vista compatability

ok this is really complicated but here goes. I have 2 systems an xp sp1 with an elite board and a vista x64 with an evge 750i now i got this sea gate barracuda 500gb to use as another drive in the vista machine and it worked fine for awhile then it started not being recognized after shutting down so i would have to unplug it and plug it back in and restart sometime a few times before the vista machine would recognize and it always sees it in the bios screens but it hangs at recognition and after recognition and at vista boot and i mean serious lag here couple of minutes each screen and then just the other day it stopped seeing it all together in vista it still sees the drive in the bios screen. So i decided the drive was screwed but for fun stuck in my xp machine on a raid card and it worked like a dream absolutely no issues. So i thought it was vista so i popped my xp cd into the evga machine put the drive back and booted from cd and the xp cd would not see the drive at all so i tried a linux distro pclinuxos and linux would not see it. Seagate gave me this seatools thing and it would not recognize the drive either so i called evga and seagate several times to no avail i reinstalled the mobo drivers and looked for a firmware update ect, ect, ect. evga and seagate were both stumped and offered to replace the drive and or the mobo but i dont want to replace either especially not the mobo. I got an almost identical drive from a friend i bought it for and stuck it in the evga/vista machine and it worked perfect. Then when i was on the phone with evga last night i shut down the vista machine and took the drive of the raid card in the xp machine and put it into the vista machine I was a little rough with it by now and banged it around a bit and much to our surprize the thing worked like a dream. But when i shut down for whatever reasone the drive was gone again. So i donno ?? i tried using the raid card in the vista machine it would see the card but not the drive, i tried all the channels in the evga board, tried 10 different data cables, tried without the os sata2 which is a western digital 80gb sata2, i must add that an older version of seatools for dos saw the drive it was on ultimate boot cd 4.1.1 and another utility on that cd saw it as well. I tried taking the 1.5 data limit jumper off the drive. So if someone can explain this one i sure would appriciate it the drive is in the xp machine now on the raid card and its working perfect.

Many new motherboards use AHCI to control the SATA hard drives, Windows XP
does not have an AHCI driver built into it, thus your Windows XP CD could not
have seen the drive on the evga motherboard, unless you went into the BIOS
and switched AHCI off. Your Linux Distro may have the same issue.

As far as the drive showing up and disappearing, sorry, no help. I would
however not recommend using that drive for critical data in any machine until
you find a good reason for the disappearance.

"tyrram" wrote:

I have Seagate Barracuda hard drives in my Vista PC and originally they too
were not recognised by my ASUS P5B motherboard. However I discovered that
the .inf files used by the motherboard were supplied by Intel and were out
of date (i.a. not Vista compatible). A visit to the Intel web site and a
search for .inf files for my 965 chipset produced a newer version and after
installation everything worked fine. Obviously I cannot guarantee that an
updated .inf file will solve your problem, but, I suggest that it is worth a
try. I don't know whether your Evge motherboard uses Intel chipsets but you
user manual should tell you the manufacturer and clearly that it where your
search should start.

Good luck.

"tyrram" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:013fc0b72dc45b0e75538d19563579e7@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Evga use Nvidia chipsets