Gigabyte motherboards are harmful and can cause data loss
Unfortunately certain models of Gigabyte motherboards play very nasty tricks with your hard disks — entirely without your permission — by setting up Host Protected Areas. These unauthorised modifications to your hard disk can cause the loss of hundreds of Gigabytes of data. Personally I lost a 1.2TB RAID 0 array. [1]
I do not know which models of Gigabyte motherboards are affected but the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H certainly is; according to this post on opensolaris.org, the GA-G31M-S2L is also affected. If anybody else has experienced this, please post a comment.
The Host Protected Area means that a certain area of the disk is reserved. That’s not too bad on a disk that has never been used in another system. You lose a few tens of megabytes, which isn’t too significant on disks of hundreds of gigabytes. However, if the system has already been used in another system, and contains a partition table or is part of a RAID array, or LVM volume, your data will not be accessible and will essentially be lost.
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