Ok I did a hardware test about 3 times now. I get a hard drive failure error on bay one from the main hard drive. I didn't think about plugging it in another bay until I wiped my drive clean:'( needless to say I don't get the error on any other bay but one.. could this mean the controller is bad?
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Are you saying that you tested the same drive in two different bays and got different results?
could this mean the controller is bad?
It might but I doubt it , see below. I've always had my doubts about the no cable mounting method apple is using in mac pros. My doubts centered around how many times you can insert/withdraw a drive into the socket socket over the lifetime of the machine before the pins wear out. Admittedly you don't do that too many times over the lifetime of the machine but still it's always been a concern of mine. And how much is too much?
So what you probably should do first is simply look at the bay one socket to see if there is any damage or looks suspicious. Compare it against bay 2 which you say is working for you.
The reason I don't think it is the controller is because I believe all the drive bays are on the same sata2 buss. So if the controller would fail I would think all the bays would fail. But you say the drive works in the other bays. I may be wrong on this and I'm sure someone will come along to correct me.
Another possiblity is the cabling to the bay (back plane?). But I don't know much about that area.
Linc Davis, yeah...bay 1 I got the error and bay 3 it did fine mo error at all. I've never removed the drive at all but its been acting a little slow and sluggish lately and crashing
Now I'm confused. The HD in bay1 fails. That same HD moved to bay3 works (more-or-less). What I'm confused now is your previous post saying "I've never removed the drive at all".
Do you have another drive you can test in bay 1?
I always thought the controller is in the hard disk itself but not the bay? Isn't the controller part of the hard disk, which maps and remember any bad sector of the disk and the bay is merely a bus which connects the hard disk to the logic board? It would make no sense to put a controller on a bay bus as one would replace the hard disk over time and if the controller is faulty it would make any new hard disk not work.
Logicboard is what it sounds like.
I do not believe it is logic board or even can draw that conclusion now. There is confusion which drive are where and if the problem move to the new location. I would check the pins on the connector on the logic board see if any are bend or broken,
If no pins are broken or bend. I would take known good drive in the that bay and tested it again.
There is a controller on each drive have certain functions. There is another controller on the logic board which control the info going to each drive.
Will,
Yeah its the hard drive that came with the mac pro back in 08. I've never moved it meaning, the pins should be straight in all.
Bay 1 has the original drive the CPU came with. Bay 2 has another drive. The test came back with this code 4dd/11/4000000:SATA(0,0) for bay one and nothing when I moved the drive to another bay.
I've seen people think they had a bad drive slot, or drive, and try to see if the problem follows one particular drive.
The is of course an SATA controller on the logicboard part of the Southbridge.
I mean if the drive is toast, fine, replace it. Drive DSP's dont' fail, firmware can be a problem, and drive's can have mechanical issues.
One person found it next to impossible to remove the original drive without a 2nd person to help! and 3 yrs overdue for an upgrade.
hard drive controller failure
