OCZ Petrol Not Detected by BIOS

ColBackAgain

Hi Guys,
Posted this over on the OCZ forum too, but no replies yet. Boards has always been helpful in the past, so hope you guys can give a hand. Apologies if this is the wrong forum, i just assumed the "PC builders" would have a lot of knowledge an insight.

I bought an OCZ Petrol 64gb SSD about 6/8 months ago and recently it stopped working properly.

At random times it doesn't get detected by the system and i get a message along the lines of "Please attach a boot drive and restart the system"...

It doesn't even show up in the BIOS whatsoever! And then without doing anything, aside from leaving the system alone for a few hours and starting it up, the drive works perfectly again!!

I've done nothing different to cause these issues and I am wondering whats going on?

I downloaded an application to test my drive's health and it said it is in perfect condition.

Any Help Please?

Andrew

Specs:
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 2600 @ 3.40GHz 31 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Foxconn H61MXL/H61MXL-K (SOCKET 0) 29 °C
Graphics
E2351 (1920x1080@60Hz)
L22W-8 (1680x1050@60Hz)
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (ATI AIB) 32 °C
Hard Drives
60GB OCZ-PETROL (SSD)
Optical Drives
ATAPI iHAS124 B
Audio
AMD High Definition Audio Device

Monotype

It sounds very much like the problem that's been affecting 6 series Intel chipsets, especially H61, I've noticed. Most likely it will get worse as time goes on.
The Petrol isn't the most reliable drive, but I'd expect it fail more suddenly than what you've been describing.

Try updating the BIOS and if there's no newer one, RMA the board.

ColBackAgain

Monotype wrote: »

It sounds very much like the problem that's been affecting 6 series Intel chipsets, especially H61, I've noticed. Most likely it will get worse as time goes on.
The Petrol isn't the most reliable drive, but I'd expect it fail more suddenly than what you've been describing.

Try updating the BIOS and if there's no newer one, RMA the board.

didn't build the PC... I just posted in the "PC build" section, as you guys struck me as some people, who really would have experience in misbehaving components.

I Bought it and threw an ssd in, because the hdd was acting the fool. It's worked perfectly for 7 months or so and wont work sometimes lately. (around the time i installed windows 8. But I refuse to believe this is the issue, as a new OS wouldn't affect how the BIOS detects a drive.)

Like I used my pc all night last night. Tried to boot it at 1pm today, 4/5 times and it was refusing to work. So i took a nap and 4 hours later it works perfectly.

I've reset the BIOS to factory settings and have found this forum post that sounds very similar to my situtation. (http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?99669-OCZ-Petrol-64GB-randomly-disappears-from-BIOS)
The solution listed is very technical and I don't want to mess around with hardware. I'm not 100% confident and am more of a software engineer and perfer avoiding opening the PC if I can.

But it makes no sense why it just started acting this way, after months of perfect working order. Also why the "drive health" scans say its in excellent condition...

Monotype

The problem you describe is not isolated to OCZ drives. It's happened to myself and other members I've seen coming here with the same problem. I tried different cables, SSDs etc., resetting CMOS but it made no difference. It just got worse and worse as time went by.

The only thing that I found in common with the problem was that they were all Intel chipsets - 6 series, and the bulk of them were H61. See your motherboard there is H61MXL. It has the H61 chipset. I think the problem is with the motherboard itself. If you didn't build it yourself, you'll have to send it back. It's not something that can be fixed in a repair shop either, so don't even think about that. The alternative would be to get a new motherboard.

Normally I'd suggest much the same things as what's described in the post you quoted or suspect that the drive was at fault, but I think that there's a serious problem in Intel's chipsets that they haven't come clean about as this is a problem I've been coming across more and more often of late. By the way, the problem only seems to be strictly SSDs.

Check the Foxconn website anyway to see if they have a BIOS update for that motherboard.

deceit

Are they not the boards (h61) that had the degrading sata slots on them. I believe it affected only either one controller or the other so it might be worth trying the other sata controller until you have a new board or rma it.

Monotype

This happens on even the B3 boards. I'm guessing Intel didn't fix it properly or BIOS updates are not being released. The unusual thing is that it only seems to affect SSDs, although maybe the HDDs might disappear too if you start booting from them.