computer not recognizing new hdd

J

johnh289

New Member
i just purchased a new western digital 400 gb sata hdd and im trying to add it to my system which already has a 200gb wd ide hdd but for some reason the computer is not recognizing the second drive


i tried it with no jumpers on the original drive (ide 200gb) and that didnt work
and then i put a jumper on the original drive in the "master with slave" position
but i didnt put a jumper on the new sata drive because on top of the drive it says "master/slave jumpers not required for sata"

and that didnt work either
and the second drive isnt showing up in disk management


if anybody can help that would be great!!! :-\
 
When adding a sata drive to an existing system with an ide host you have no need for even touching the existing jumpers. For a single sata drive that is plugged into the #1 sata socket on the board. With the necessary sata drivers installed on the host/OS drive and sata controllers in the bios enabled you should see the "new hardware found" popup message when booting up for the first time. This is seen on the taskbar requesting drivers.

Make sure you have the actual sata drivers for the board installed first. Set the jumper as master if you are running the ide at the end of the cable and even go to the board manufacturer's support site if needed for the updates there. The new sata drive should be seen in the post screen when first turning the system on or rebooting the system. This will show if the drive is working. But you still need to perform two tasks to make the drive usable.

1)reuirement for hard drive partitioning tool. GParted(free) works great here.
2)The drive will need to be formmatted to be seen as a new logical drive in the current Windows installation.
3) a third item? A reminder to see which sata socket on the board was the sata data cable plugged into and double check to see if you forgot? the power plug for the new drive? That will goof the works!
 
Does the drive show up in the bios? Have you tried running just the new drive and seeing if your computer will see it in the bios?
 
hmmm...

it doesnt recognize the drive at all

i tried just booting with the new drive but it says something like boot failure.


so im thinking it has something to do with the drivers and the updated bios

but i really have no idea where to look for that stuff :-\
 
Of course you can't boot to the new drive, it's blank ;P I wanted you to try and go to the BIOS and see if it wad detected.

And no, drivers wouldn't be the problem. MAYBE updating the bios, but I doubt it...
 
ok... :)

i went into the bios and im not exactly a pro at doing this kind of stuff so i wasnt sure where exactly to look for it

but i looked in all of the different categories and couldnt find anything about it

would it be under "standard cmos features"?
because when i go to that i see "primary ide master, slave, etc"

if im completely wrong please let me know lol

i dont do this too often so i dont realy know what im doing
 
Yeah, it should be there.... You might need to set the detection to AUTO. If it's disabled, well then that's your problem ;) I know I disable my unused IDE channels. It speeds up POST a bit.
 
argh..

it just has the ide drives (primary master ---> fourth slave) and then a floppy disk drive

i dont see anything about sata drives anywhere

im not sure what im doing wrong lol
 
Where the boot order for drives is seen when selecting the cd rom, hard drive, etc. as first, second, third in the boot order is selected many board have the additional menu of choosing a specific hard drive when highlighting the "hard drive" item and pressing the enter key. That opens a new screen where you should see the ide drive, the new sata if detected properly, and some other card bus option. The right column in the bios sometimes also has a small guide for using the "+" and "-" keys on the numpad for movung one drive to the top of the list there. That makes it the default boot drive.

The first step before simply browsing the bios is to look over the information seen in the board's user manual or open a pdf file for the manual at the support site and look through the section on bios setup. But if you not OSing the sata you would simply look at the first screen seen when first turning on the power. The initial post screen is where all drives are detected and tested. It should be seen by make and model number there.
 
did you try checking disk management section of windows?
ill bet its there and its just not formatted yet... sata is pretty good at getting detected by the bios... try plugging it into a different sata port if its not showing up in disk management..
 
yeah i did and it doesnt show up in there
and i tried unplugging the old drive and starting it but the bios didnt recognize the new drive either

my friend said it could have something to do with the new drive being a sata II drive and my motherboard may not support it. he said that i could put a jumper on it to reduce the speed to 1.5 instead but idk if thats the problem and if it is i dont know which pins to put it on.

could this be the problem?
 
You won't find a jumper on a sata drive since each drive installed is a master on the next channel over from the other like sata master #1, #2, #3, etc. unless set as an array where two drives act as one. The specifications and product information on the make and model board there should indicate whether it is sata 2.0.

But with the drive seeing both power and data cables plugged in there should have been something seen on the post screen unless the sata controllers on the board are disabled? Or is the drive is foobar? The cable itself could be bad too. That's another thing to look at. The drive should have been seen at post if good and you have a good cable plugged in and didn't forget to plug the power in?
 
the motherboard doesnt have sata 2 just sata
when i go into the bios i cant find anything about sata controllers anywhere

i called wd support and she told me to contact the manufacturer to find out how to install them but its pretty much impossible to get any help from msi.

so im not sure exactly what to do.

i also went to the wd website and it said something about placing jumpers on the 5 and 6 pins because that would make it run at 1.5 but that didnt do anything so im pretty sure it has something to do with the sata controllers but i really dont know how to fix the problem...

help?!?!?
 
What make and model board do you have there? The product information and specifications can be looked at to see how to work out having sata drives run without a need for adding in a controller card. The model WD drive can also help here.

The Asus A8N SLI board here doesn't specify SATA II while seeing two new WD 500gb sata drives running without problems. Make sure you have the board's latest drivers installed. That may be why you are seeing a problem.
 
What did you find when trying other advices? That would be useful for future reference if you later see additional problems.
 
fade2green514 said:
did you try checking disk management section of windows?
ill bet its there and its just not formatted yet... sata is pretty good at getting detected by the bios... try plugging it into a different sata port if its not showing up in disk management..
Click to expand...

Trust me that's what it is. I had the same problem when putting in a new HD. Just right click My Computer on desktop then go to Manage. Then find Disk Management and you'll see it there. Format it.
 
First you have to partition a drive before you can format it. With XP the Disk Management tool is good for formatting and deleting partitions as well as changing drive letters. But it won't partition the drive only remove existing partitions in the right click menu. GParted has proved an excellent tool even Vista and two XPs running on three different drives here. XP Pro went on one of the two sata drives.
 
yah the new drive u have to install windows on and format.... prolly install both drives at once.... one with windows so u can bootup and then format second drive withint windows... gl
 
When going to install Vista when the new version came out GParted detected that the XP installer had left an unexplained 8mb of drive space when the XP installer was used for creating the primary on the host drive. That was odd! So Gparted was then used to increase the partition to the actual amount detected.

One thing that GParted isn't often used for and Vista can now perform is formatting the partition without installing Windows. This allows you to partition and format more then one drive before the installation proceeds. A full format after partitioning a drive with the Disk Management tool does seem to take a bit longer in both XP and Vista alike. A minor annoyance there.
 
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