hdd in bios

J

jhanson132001

New Member
ok so my sister gave me her laptop with a broken cracked screen, i of course took it apart and salvaged the hard drive. it is a standard 2.5 inch tiny hard drive with sata connecters for power and interface.

i can not get the bios to recognize the hard drive. i went to standard cmos features and to master hdd and clicked find hard drive, (something like that) and nothing. dont understand because i put in another hard drive with non sata, ( im thinking its called floppy??) connecter and it did find it. is there something you have to do to turn on the sata interfaces on the mobo?

any help would be great.
 
What computer/motherboard do you have this drive attached to? If its a dell, then yes, they usually have an option in the bios to enable/disable the sata ports.
 
Check the bios to see there is an option to enable/disable the sata ports. Do you have sata power cable attached to the hard drive? Can you hear the drive spin up when you turn the pc on?
 
yes sir i hear it and feel it and the only thing in bios i can find with the word "sata" on it is something called "raid" whatever that is i enabled it
still not recognizing the hard drive
 
Check disk management to see if its detected there. As long as both power and data cables are attached then the pc should see the drive providing the drive isn't defective.
 
ok so, in bios, i did get the 2.5 inch hdd to detect. it is detected as channel 3 primary. cant see any way to get it to channel 0 primary, (does that matter, no i wont have another hard drive for now) i set boot order properly, still cant get my windows disks to load. i am going to attempt to put windows iso on a flash drive, not sure if there is a way.
and tell me about this "raid" business????
curious. thanks for your help sir. sure wish i had the disk and manual for this motherboard
 
Raid means taking 2 or more hard drives and combining them into a single disk. Raid 1 for reduntancy and raid 0 for speed. Don't worry about the channel for data drives, doesn't matter.

As lone there is data on the drive then windows should see it and automatically assign it a drive letter. But on the weird occassion that it doesn't, check disk management to make sure its detected in windows. You may just have to assign it a drive letter.
 
ok thanks, so the hard drive is being detected, data is showing up, storage space etc.the problem now is that i cannot get this portable usb dvd burner to boot my windows disk. i set boot priority to 1 usb cd drive 2 hard disk 3 disabled. i do here the cd spinning i just cant tell if its trying to load windows. so on another level. i downloaad windows iso, im not proud but im broke.. is there something i need to do with the iso image other than just burning it. ? some way to make it bootable?? perhaps i have the settings so messed up in bios that its hopeless. in bios is there a way to make everthing default?? i know i saw something about fail safe default. this bios im running seems so basic but i must have done something. i did disable this raid thing and put that off. so one of 2 things could be happening.... 1 my disk drive is retarted 2 cant boot of the disk i made or 3 my disks are all fail.

let me know what you think sir, and thank you for your time
 
Are you actually writing the iso image to a cd or are you just copying the file to a cd? You need to write the image to a cd. You will need to use software that will write iso images to cd.

Free iso burner
Imgburn
PowerISO
Nero
Roxio
 
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