New SATA drive not detected

PsychomIKE

PsychomIKE

PsychomIKE

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Joined
20 Oct 2005
Posts
112
Hi there,

Can someone help me out? I've just bought a new SATA drive (Samsung) and Win XP and the BIOS are failing to detect it. My windows install is on my old PATA one and I wanted to run them both in unison until I'd copied across all the stuff I need etc.

I've searched here and the web but nothing seems to help. I've checked cables, changed SATA sockets and temporarily disconnected my old drive incase of conflict. As you can tell I'm desperate so, any other ideas or is my drive fubared?

I'm on a gigabyt enforce4 sli mobo.

Thanks for your time.
 
Have you checked that SATA is enabled in bios? With Nforce4 I'd expect it to be on by default but it is possible that it got switched off somewhere along the line. Other than that if it isn't recognised by bios at all then it might well be that the drive is dead.
 
I forgot to say, I also purchased a SATA DVD writer at the same time and that's working fine. Is it correct that the SATA power lead shares with the DVD write as well? Can anything go wrong in that respect? I noticed the drive seems to warm up though, so i think it's getting power.

Thanks for the help:)
 
It shouldn't make any difference if you are splitting the power lead between the DVDRW and the hard drive. If the SATA DVDRW is working fine then it does look more likely that the drive is shafted.
 
Try swapping the SATA ports on the mobo, ie where the DVD drive was plug that into where the HDD was. If that doesn't work then it's most definitively the HDD.
 
Well I've now swapped sockets, power cables, sata cables etc but to no avail. Guess it is dead so I'll get emailing the company I got it from (not overclockers). Thanks for your help guys :cool:
 
I returned the HDD as faulty to the company and they finally got back to me saying that it has tested as fine. I don't really want to pay the extortinate charge they want to send it back to me only to find out it's still not working but has anyone seen this befoe? Could be my motherboard at fault?

Cheers
 
When you say the DVD drive was working fine, did you put a CD/DVD in the drive and was able to run it? Or did it just open and close when you pressed the eject button?

If the latter is the case then you might have needed to change a setting in your bios to allow windows to detect the hard drive without installing drivers.
 
Im not 100% knowledgable on this but did you try setting the sata jumper on the drive to slow it down a bit?

That samsung drive is sata2 and the board supports it, but sods law might be kicking in and messing things up, is the sata chipset silicon image by any chance?
 
I assume you went into disk management and tried to partition the new drive? a brand new unformatted and unpartitioned drive will not show up in xp unless you goto disk management and initialise the drive.
 
Nothing shows up in disc management for me to initialise. I did try changing the jumpers on the HDD to no affect. I've also now tried with another SATA drive differernt brand) and still no avail. Could it be my BIOS needs updating, along those lines?
 
Okay well things get weirder and weirder. I've now tried with 2 SATA drives (different brands) and neither show up in the BIOS or Windows BUT they will show up in Windows if i set it up as part of a RAID.

With my SATA and PATA drives in i also managed to boot off Win XP CD and, with a floppy disc with my SATA drivers on, could press f6 during Windows install to install the SATA drivers.... great news... Windows installed... loads up... then after a reboot the drive is no longer detected again and the machine just waits after the BIOS screen.

Can anyone help with this or suggest a forum that might help out? Sorry to keep bringing this back up but I've now got some work I urgently need to get done and need the drive working before i can start!

Cheers guys
 
It soundsl ike you want the prots running in IDE mode as opposed to RAID mode. Dont know the board, so cant help ium afraid. Must be something like
Raid prots work in IDE mode or SATA ports <Option to change between raid etc>.
 
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