vista not picking up my hardrive

Jock · 21 Apr 2008 at 23:26

Hi there,

So built my first comp and so far things seemed to be going ok though hit a problem when i tried to install vista.

I have two of these HDD's which i bought from here but when i boot vista says there are no hdd's.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-054-SA

None of the two of them show up so when it asks where i want install vista theres nowhere to select.

Its my first time installing a OS so i imagine this may well be something simple but i have no idea myself.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: In case it makes a difference this is the mobo:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-022-IN&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=

fonzee · 21 Apr 2008 at 23:28

you'll more than likely have to load the AHCI drivers first and also enable it in the BIOS.

google this, lots of info about.

RobH · 21 Apr 2008 at 23:56

Or you can just turn off AHCI (sometimes called native mode) in the BIOS. I had some issues with it so I ended up turning it off, it doesn't really offer any benefits and it added about 5 seconds to my boot time because of it's loader.

Jock · 22 Apr 2008 at 00:33

Cheers for the help lads though i managed to fix it in the end.

While googling for ahci drivers, i came across loads of possible answers to the probalem and out of all of them ive no idea why i chose this one, but one guy mentioed that despite having 6 sata ports only 4 worked, so he plugged them into different ones. I had my dvd in the first of six and the 2 hdd's in the fifth and sixth, so moved them up to 3 and 4 and voila, vista recognised them and installed fine. Not knowing anything about comps i dont know if 4 do only work or whether something else changed but whatever it was it worked

Thanks again lads, much appreciated.

RobH · 22 Apr 2008 at 01:40

Yeah it's a common problem people come across, the ports aren't faulty it's just that they are running on a different controller that requires a driver. For example my Gigabyte motherboard has 4 SATA ports provided by the Intel ICH8 chipset and another 2 provided by the Gigabyte chipset, the Gigabyte ones need a driver for setup. It can be quite confusing when you start playing with things like AHCI and RAID so you probably made the right decision as it will cause you the least problems.