990FX Extreme9 Not posting w/10 TB HDD [SOLVED]

Hi All,

I joined in the hopes to get an answer for why a newly purchased Seagate IronWolf 10TB Hard drive will not let my Asrock 990FX Extreme9 post.

I've tested and tried various things, consulted the IT guy at work who has 20 plus years of experience. I myself am an IT guy, but with only a few years and i've built plenty of computers and troubleshot my own issues throughout them.

After all my troubleshooting, I can't figure it out.

Current behavior: when i power the system up, the UEFI bios flashes, goes to the SATA expansion card addon ROM, then reverts back to the motherboard splash screen (this part is normal and has been for several years).  But instead of going to the Windows start up screen, it hangs on the mobo splash screen. The moment i disconnect the POWER from the 10TB HDD, it continues and follows through to the Windows 7 bootup screen.  The 10TB HDD is formatted in NFTS with GPT.  

All other drives are NFTS/MBR. I've googled everything i can think of and I don't know what to do. I don't want to split the 10 TB into two MBR partitions.   I have one more test to try (by recommendation of the IT guy; take a 500 GB drive, format it in GPT- to find if there is any incompatibility between the 990FX board and GPT).

I also ask this because I have a behemoth build planned and it's going to have enough storage to make my current one (of 11 TB) look like a child's play thing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Edited by MattD - 04 May 2018 at 5:41am

JohnM wrote: Which SATA port are you connecting it to? Is it in AHCI mode - not legacy IDE mode?

As far as I'm aware, all SATA ports are in AHCI mode, which makes me want to dig through the manual to see if there is a specific SATA Port I should connect it to.  Currently, the 10TB drive is connected to a Vantec 4+1 SATA 2 & Pata PCI-E Combo Model UGT-IS100R PCEx1 card.  This card has no issues and works properly as I have another 1 TB HDD connected to it. 

I had originally thought that it was the expansion card and plugged the 10TB drive into a motherboard SATA, but that failed to boot as well.

JohnM wrote: What is the largest capacity disk that you've had working with this motherboard? See https://www.asrock.com/feature/3tb/ and http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3018764/asrock-990fx-extreme9-failure-format-4tb-hdds.html I trust you're already on the latest BIOS? See also this: https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/HGST-Power-Disable-Pin-TB.pdf It's a different brand and probably completely unrelated but worth remembering.

The largest hard drive that I currently have working with this motherboard, without issue is a 4TB Western Digital.  It detects and loads Windows 7 without failure.  I too assumed that the 3 TB fix may help, but it didn't.

Yes, your trust is correct, one of the first things I checked.  I'm on 1.8, released on 4/28/2016.

EDIT: just tested with a 500 GB hard drive that was formated to 465 with GPT. No issues at all. It's the sheer size of the 10 TB that needs figured out. Which is very disheartening since I'll be buying more of these drives for a WIP threadripper build.


Edited by MattD - 03 May 2018 at 8:54am

Is there any way to tell if my PSU is a legacy Power Supply?

RAIDMAX Technology Inc.
Switching Power Supply
RX-850AE 80 Plus Gold

Bought it on 4/3/2012
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx%3FItem=N82E16817152043

I would prefer not to dig around and try and find the appropriate cables to make this work, but if i have to, I will.  it begs another question though...

Will I have the same issue with my recertified Corsair AX1500i power supply with the sheer number of 10TB drives I plan on hooking up?

I'm not one to worry about the electric bill... TIA.

cristy6100 wrote: No, a AX1500i can hold about 60 SATA drives and will still have headroom for the rest of the system and then some more :)) (and its SATA Rev. 3.3 compatible) The SB950 southbridge should support 10TB drives, you should set the SATA controller to RAID mode and check again.

lol. I wasn't worried about the number per se; i plan on attaching 10 10TB hard drives in my next build and I didn't want to have to switch all my SATA connections to molex to SATAs to get around this possible issue.

I'll check more stuff tonight as I need to skedaddle for work. Thank you though!

EDIT: did some digging with this new SATA 3.3 revision and what it meant with my older PSU. sounds like this is the issue. I'm going to test the solution tonight and test the 10 TB hard drive on the newer system thats a WIP.   If everything goes smoothly and things are solved, I'll mark it as such.

Was there any announcement with this newer revision of SATA power cable?


Edited by MattD - 03 May 2018 at 9:13pm