Help setting up a second hard drive.

[demarpaint]

I installed a new Hard drive on a Win XP machine, and decided to use the old one as a second hard drive in the same system. I don’t have a jumper pin. It is a SATA drive. Win XP doesn’t see the drive in the control panel or in Disk Manager. I realize Win XP gets confused when it sees two Operating Systems, and the second drive has to be formatted. I can't format it if Windows doesn't see it. I then set up as a primary drive in an attempt to format it. I booted from my win XP CD and was able to delete the two partitions I had on it. When I attempt to format the drive as soon as its done it starts to install Win XP again. So the best I could do was to delete the partitions. When I set it up after deleting the partitions as the second drive it is not seen. There is power going to the drive because it is spinning, and it is properly connected. It is not listed in the BIOS either. Any suggestions are appreciated.

I've set up IDE drives without issues in other systems this one has me stumped. Thanks!

 

[eljefino]

Win XP needs a SATA driver for its primary drive when it asks for a SCSI driver. As a secondary it should figure it out though.

If you leave it set up as it is and run say a ubuntu live cd will it see everything?

 

[Rand]

how are you setting it up as the second drive?

are you talking bios boot order?

also what sizes are the drives and do you have SP3 installed?

 

[yonyon]

If the BIOS doesn't recognise it something is wrong. You may have a faulty SATA cable or a dead drive. Check that it is plugged in. Check again. If it still appears to be plugged in, try using another cable.

If you can get BIOS to see it you can use a Linux LiveCD to run gparted and format it as NTFS.

 

[demarpaint]

I have a bay for a second hard drive, I connected it, and booted the machine. I went into the control panel and the second HD is not there. I went into disk management, and its not there. I went into the BIOS and all I see is the primary hard drive, and the CD DVD drive. The drive I installed as the slave drive doesn't appear anywhere.

eljefino- I don't understand what you're saying?

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: yonyon
If the BIOS doesn't recognise it something is wrong. You may have a faulty SATA cable or a dead drive.


The drive works, it was my primary hard drive. If I remove the new drive and put the old one back I was able to boot the system and run windows off it. Now it is blank because I deleted the partitions on it. Power is going to it, I can feel it spinning.

 

[yonyon]

Spinning doesn't mean the bus is working. Boot from CD or USB with it as the only hard drive connected. See if it shows up as existing that way.

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: yonyon
Spinning doesn't mean the bus is working. Boot from CD or USB with it as the only hard drive connected. See if it shows up as existing that way.


When I plug in as the only hard drive it works. In fact it works in both bays as the primary hard drive.

 

[yonyon]

Plugged into the same cable and through that cable to the same connector on the mainboard? If so, next try disconnecting power to all optical drives and any fans other than the main CPU fan.

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: yonyon
Plugged into the same cable and through that cable to the same connector on the mainboard?
Yes

Originally Posted By: yonyon
If so, next try disconnecting power to all optical drives and any fans other than the main CPU fan.
Before I do that, do I need a jumper pin for this drive now? If so I don't have one, and I'm wondering if that could be my problem.

What an I looking to accomplish by doing this? Thanks!

 

[yonyon]

I've yet to see a SATA drive that uses jumpers. If you have one, refer to the label on the drive. You might also consider typing the model number of that drive into Google or the manufacturer's support web site.

If it doesn't need to be jumpered, it's possible that your mainboard has a limit to the total number of drives it will recognise. It is also possible (especially if you have a [censored]tastic name-brand economy desktop) that you have a $10 power supply that can't crank out the amps to support so many drives.

 

[Jeffy_D]

Make sure you running the latest version of the bios.go to the manufacturer website and download the latest bios update.

If that doesn't fix it, pop the bios battery out or press the yellow cmos reset button on the motherboard for 10 seconds with no power being supplied to the pc. It will then re-detect every periphrial attached to the motherboard.

 

[demarpaint]

Ok so a SATA drive doesn't use a jumper, that's good and what I thought, and probably why I don't have one.

The BIOS is up to date. I'll try the battery trick.

Yonyon, I disconnected the power to all optical drives and any fans other than the main CPU fan. It made no difference.

 

[PostalBound]

That does not make sense to me. If you deleted the partitions, you need to create a new partition(s) before you can format.

Put it in as secondary drive and use dos prompt and fdisk or get software from the hd manufacturer to recreate your partition and format. Once done, go to management and enable drive.

 

[javacontour]

If you have a SATA DVD drive, try "borrowing" the port for that drive to see if you can see two HDs. I don't see where you tried this.

Does the drive spin up?

Have you tried finding new hardware? (I don't think you need to do this, but then again, we are talking windows, right?)

Do you need to have your BIOS discover the drive?

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: PostalBound
That does not make sense to me. If you deleted the partitions, you need to create a new partition(s) before you can format.

Put it in as secondary drive and use dos prompt and fdisk or get software from the hd manufacturer to recreate your partition and format. Once done, go to management and enable drive.


I can't see the drive to format it, or I'd do that. If you read about I tried it as a primary drive, which is what it was to begin with, I installed a new bigger hard drive and decided to use this one as a spare. After windows couldn't find it I removed the new drive which is the primary and has the OS on it, I installed the old one again. Once I installed the old drive I tried to format the drive, windows won't allow it. I booted from the XP CD and tried to format just before installing Win XP again, [I didn't want to install XP again]. After the format it starts to install XP again, so the best I could do was delete partitions.

I'll try getting software from WD Website, but as I mentioned I can't see the HD. Thanks for the reply.

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: javacontour
If you have a SATA DVD drive, try "borrowing" the port for that drive to see if you can see two HDs. I don't see where you tried this.

Does the drive spin up?

Have you tried finding new hardware? (I don't think you need to do this, but then again, we are talking windows, right?)

Do you need to have your BIOS discover the drive?


The drive spins up. Windows doesn't see any new hardware. When I go into the BIOS the drive doesn't appear there either. This is a unique problem anything I Google it seems anyone with a problem can locate the drive, I can't locate it.

If pulling the battery on the mother board doesn't work, I'll make it an external drive and call it a day I think.

 

[UG_Passat]

Post screen shots of the diskmgmt --- I had a similar issue setting up an old SATA drive as a secondary drive on windows 7... where diskmgmt recognized it, but the control panel didn't.

 

[Rand]

sounds like your second bay sata cable isnt plugged into the motherboard?

does your new hdd work plugged into that one?

if no its an issue with that cable or connection.

 

[Rand]

or possibly you need to change some bios setting.