Adding a new HD that the system won't recognize

timboW

New Member
I was hoping someone could help me with a hard drive issue I’m having on my computer.

I recently purchased a 200GB Maxtor ATA HD to supplement the 80GB SATA HD I’ve had on board my computer since I put it together a couple of years ago. I followed the directions when I installed it, but as far as my computer is concerned the unit doesn’t exist. The instructions told me to use the disk provided to make the installation, but when I called up the program it only recognized the 80GB HD already present. I then tried using windows’ own hardware installation utility to see if it would do the job, but again the 200GB wasn’t recognized.

Is there a conflict between the present HD being SATA, while the other is an ATA unit connected directly to the Mobo with the ATA connector cable?

I also set up the 200 GB HD as a slave unit, as I basically want to use it for storage purposes, and I wondered if that may be where the problem emanates from.

I tried going into BIOS in accordance with the instructions, but again I could find nothing to make the computer recognize that a new unit had been installed. The instructions say to highlight the ‘auto-detect’ feature and press enter, but I couldn’t find anything in BIOS that matched up to this.

I haven’t tinkered around with the RAID settings by the way, if that helps.

Sorry to sound such a dunce, but if someone could point the way out of this mess for me I’d certainly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance………Tim

ASUS P4P800-E deluxe Mobo
Intel Pentium 4 3.0E Prestcott
Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 SATA 150
Radeon 9600 126MB DDR AGP
Kingston DDR 400 SDRAM (1GB)
Creative sound blaster 128 PCI
Optorite DVD burner
Thermaltake Purepower W0009R ATX 420 Watt
Maxtor Ultra 200GB 7200 ATA 133
 

Sacrinyellow5

New Member
Is the ATA drive set up as the slave drive? Are the pins on the HD configured correctly, so it is read as the slave drive? I'm not sure if you need to do this, seeing how your main drive is SATA, but I'm sure it couldn't hurt.

Is the drive starting up and receiving power?
Have you tried using a different IDE cable?
 

timboW

New Member
Hi again,
Well, I’ve been backwards and forwards with this problem, thought I’d solved it, and am now more or less back to square one!

I discovered what my initial problem was this morning. Having made the recommended adjustment to the unit to switch it back to the ‘master’ setting I found that it still didn’t work, and I began to suspect that I may have done something wrong when I plugged it in. Sure enough when I checked I discovered I’d plugged the HD into the RAID connecter on the board instead of the spare IDE insert (I was lying under my desk in semi dark with a small flashlight in my mouth when I plugged it in initially!) and once I’d moved the cable over everything came good, more or less. The system finally recognized the HD, I was able to install it, but then ran into the problem that the size of the HD (200GB) caused the operating system to have a fit.

I’d been led to believe that with SP1 on board I wouldn’t have a problem, but try as might all I could do was make the system accept the max. partition of 137GB, regardless of a few different things I tried.

I finally took the option of ducking out to buy an Ultra ATA/133 IDE RAID controller card to put in my system, but despite all my efforts over three hours I’ve been unable to convince the system to acknowledge the HD’s existence, even though I’ve successfully loaded in the appropriate drivers that came with the card.

I don’t know if it’s the cause of the problem, or a symptom of it, but one thing I have noticed is that the device manager shows a question mark next to ‘Raid controller’ with a message that states ‘the drivers for this device are not installed (code 28)’.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance………..Tim


ASUS P4P800-E deluxe Mobo
Intel Pentium 4 3.0E Prestcott
Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 SATA 150
Radeon 9600 126MB DDR AGP
Kingston DDR 400 SDRAM (1GB)
Creative sound blaster 128 PCI
Optorite DVD burner
Thermaltake Purepower W0009R ATX 420 Watt
Maxtor Ultra 200GB 7200 ATA 133
Ultra ATA/133 IDE RAID controller
 

Cromewell

Administrator
Staff member
Going by the MS KBs, SP1 should have 48bit LBA enabled. Run regedit and find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\ and check if EnableBigLba is set to 1
 

timboW

New Member
Latest update!

I got sick and tired of all the trouble involved with the card and figured it must have a conflict with the ASUS board, so I took it out. I then decided to just go back to the former setup of having the 200GB HD connected to the spare IDE socket and just live with the 137GB capacity enforced upon me. Easier said than done – XP just kept getting stuck at the intro page (with the little blue thing going left to right constantly) and just stayed there. I tried entering via safe mode and all I kept getting was the blue screen. If I disconnected the new HD everything was fine.

Why, when I finally got the system to accept it before within its limitations, am I now having problems – nothing ever seems to be easy when it comes to installing new hardware, it always has to be a trial! I tried doing a system restore to a date prior to the initial installation of the HD, thinking that perhaps putting the IDE controller card may have screwed some settings up, but that didn’t work either. I’m at my wits end trying to figure out what to do. From simply trying to increase the storage space on my computer, I’ve spent the better part of three days screwing around and seemingly going backwards – at least two days ago I had 137GB of extra capacity – now I can’t even get that back!

Very frustrated!

A couple of points. In BIOS, the default setting is RAID, but if I'm running SATA and ATA drives conventionally shouldn't it be switched to IDE? And shouldn't it be switched from just SATA to SATA+PATA? I've played with both settings to see if it would make any difference, and it hasn't, but it seemed to make sense that one or both needed to be changed anyway.

By the way, to Cromewell - I did run Regedit and couldn't find the folder you mentioned. I must be looking in the wrong area me thinks. Once/if I can get the new HD operating again on the system I'll try and sort that out.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

Tim
 

Cromewell

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah you should set RAID to IDE. It's hard to know what's happening without being able to tinker with it. There is probably something that I'm missing but I don't know what it is.
 

timboW

New Member
Yeah, tell me about it. I feel like throwing the HD through a window!

I do remember that when I set this system up I ran into similar problems trying to put my old HD on board to transfer programs and data across to the new HD. I ended up sticking it in my wife's older computer and burning the information onto disks, which I then used to make the trasfer over. So obviously this isn't the first time I've had issues with additional HD's not being accepted. It's just that last time I figured it had something to do with the unit being old and perhaps incompatible with the more modern board and SATA setup.

I've thought about getting an IDE/SATA converter to see if connecting the new 200GB drive to the board that way would make a difference, but logically I can't see why or how it should. And like I said, it accepted it before when I initially installed it into the correct IDE slot. Now it doesn't want to know about it.

I returned the card to the shop where I bought it, and the guy there suggested that the problem with the 137GB limitation I initially encountered could be a sign that I upgraded my system from 2000. I could have sworn that I put in a clean install of XP when I put the system together a couple of years ago, but now he's planted the germ of a suspicion, saying that the kurnel's would still be 2000 if I installed XP over the top of it. Is there a way I can somehow check this?

Another thing (because I'm trying to elminate all possibilities!) I want to check to see if the new HD is actually functioning properly and hasn't been damaged by the mucking about with the controller card. If I take out my resident 80GB HD and try making a clean install with the new 200GB on its own, just to see that it is working correctly, will I screw up my old unit when I put it back in (meaning will the operating system want to start from scratch with it?)

Any views much appreciated.

Tim
 

Cromewell

Administrator
Staff member
If you want to be absolutely sure open a command prompt and type ver but I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.
 
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