Just finished assembly, HDD not detected

J

janus

New Member
Ok, I've got a K8 NF4 triton mobo, athlon64 3000, 200g Western Sata HDD, Samsung DVD +-RW, 2x 512 PQI duel channel ram. Basically when I try to load using the CD rom which came with the mobo the computer loads, but can't detect the HDD.. what to do? The computer is detecting the dvd though..
 
By the way, this is the first time I've built a computer, the HDD is connected to teh mobo with a flat Sata cable, is there something in the bios I need to change?
 
Is the power cable connected to the HDD aswell, sorry, but you didnt mention it.....?

Well, as its a SATA drive, you may need to force a driver install through DOS, or update your BIOS, have you got an older IDE drive that you can quickly connect to get the system up and running, and then format and install the SATA drive form windows etc...
 
Try a different connect for the SATA drive I suspect you have it connected on the RAID line :)

got an older IDE drive that you can quickly connect to get the system up and running, and then format and install the SATA drive form windows etc..
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Think that through: wont work :) (not the way they want at any rate)
 
I've got the drive connected via the SATA cable, there are 4 SATA plugs on the MOBO (tried them all), there are two power connectors in the back, I've tried both of them..no dice.

In the bios I've got sata enabled and everything, wonder if there's a fault with the drive..?

Maybe I need to find a FDD to install drivers for the HDD, or is there some way to tell if the HDD's stuffed?
 
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Is it a brand new unformatted HDD???

I had a problem (with an IDE WD HDD though) where the computer couldn't see the HDD. I had to format the drive first using a win XP cd to solve the problem.

Hope that helps David..
 
Thanks David, the hdd's brand new, though I think my brother may have tried to install windows already, so will probably have to format first, then:

I think what I have to do is copy the driver files onto a floppy (+find a floppy drive from somewhere), then insert the XP boot disk, hit F6 to install SCSi and Raid drivers, then put the disk in, once these are installed the computer should be able to detect the HDD, and hopefully it will all work... fingers crossed, now to find a floppy drive....hmm...

Apparently even though I'm not using RAID, i still need the drivers installed to use a SATA drive.
 
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Apparently even though I'm not using RAID, i still need the drivers installed to use a SATA drive.
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yes thats quite common on motherboards as they have only recently (as a whole) accepted SATA natively
 
well thanks for all the advice, I ended up finding the drivers that worked here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/michael.mcclay/Drivers/SATA/3x12_x86_win_rdvr-10032.zip

copied these onto a floppy and when prompted at start of xp install to install Scsi and raid drivers, hit F6. It's up and running, stoked! Got a couple of games in the box with the graphics card (7800GT), running very smoothly!

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Now I have a seperate issue, but I haven't had a chance to try to fix it yet, so will come back with questions if I can't work it out...ie. partitioned 10G for installation of OS, now the computer's only reading the 10G I formatted, the remaining 180G (for some reason my 200G hdd only has 190G!).

:D
 
Well you lost 10gb when you format and all that for the chach, all hard drive lose some and the bigger the hard drive the more they lose. The reason you can't see you other 180gb is because you never partioned it. You have to go back in with your windows disk and just partion it and format it, or use a program like partion magic. You can't see it in windows because it's not partioned.
 
Now I have a seperate issue, but I haven't had a chance to try to fix it yet, so will come back with questions if I can't work it out...ie. partitioned 10G for installation of OS, now the computer's only reading the 10G I formatted, the remaining 180G (for some reason my 200G hdd only has 190G!).
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So whats the problem? You need to partition and format the remainder of the drive to access it :)

Well you lost 10gb when you format and all that for the chach, all hard drive lose some and the bigger the hard drive the more they lose
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1. The HDD was never 200GB to start with it was 200B bytes :)
2. The losing more space thing for "bigger" only applies to cluster size
 
Got it all sorted last night, now I've got C drive as 20G, and E drive as 170G, took a while to do, it's all up and running now :D

Is there some way to monitor the temperature of the CPu and the fan speed etc whilst in XP? I only know to get them whilst in the bios..

Been playing this game, 'snowblind' which came with the graphics card, it's pretty good, once I finish it I'm getting HL2. still need a net connection too.

As far as optimising the hardware/software goes, I've got one little issue which I'm not sure on. on the taskbar on the right (where msn messenger sits) there's the remove hardware icon, and when I click on it, it brings up the HDD, why is this? When I look at the drivers for the HDD, there are two listed, should there only be one? Thanks :D
 
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