New Hard Drive Not Recognized

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ron Stone
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Ron Stone

I am running XP MCE with a ASUS motherboard that supports 4 SATAII hard
drives.
I currently have drives C, and D.
I purchased a new Western Digital 500gb. SATAII hard drive and installed it
as my third drive.
The BIOS shows the new drive correctly, and when XP comes up, I see it in
Device Manager.
However, the new drive is not visible in My Computer of in Windows Explorer.
After much putzing around, I swapped out my original 'D' drive with my new
drive, and I have the same problem. It's in the BIOS and Device Manager,
but not visible in Explorer.
The motherboard does support SATAII with the 3gb/s transfer rate, but after
reading a tip on the WD site about older mother boards, I did apply a jumper
that brought it down to 1.5gb/s to no avail.
I'm stumped as to why BIOS sees this drive but not Explorer.
I have the latest XP fixes as well as the latest BIOS and other updates for
the motherboard.

I would appreciate any tips/pointers/suggestions etc.

p.s.
I did submit a question to the WD support site, but as yet, have to hear
back.

Thanks.
 
I just noticed the following:
In Device Manager the properties for my C drive show: Location 0(0)
My 'D' drive shows: Location 1(1)
My new drive shows: Location 1(1)

This sure looks like some sort of conflict to me.
For what it's worth I do have 2 DVD players installed via the regular IDE
cables.
I tried swapping the new drive on the motherboard from a 'Slave' connector
to the second 'Master' connector, but have the same problem.

Thanks.
 
Ron Stone said:
I am running XP MCE with a ASUS motherboard that supports 4 SATAII hard
drives.
I currently have drives C, and D.
I purchased a new Western Digital 500gb. SATAII hard drive and installed
it as my third drive.
The BIOS shows the new drive correctly, and when XP comes up, I see it in
Device Manager.
However, the new drive is not visible in My Computer of in Windows
Explorer.
After much putzing around, I swapped out my original 'D' drive with my new
drive, and I have the same problem. It's in the BIOS and Device Manager,
but not visible in Explorer.
The motherboard does support SATAII with the 3gb/s transfer rate, but
after reading a tip on the WD site about older mother boards, I did apply
a jumper that brought it down to 1.5gb/s to no avail.
I'm stumped as to why BIOS sees this drive but not Explorer.
I have the latest XP fixes as well as the latest BIOS and other updates
for the motherboard.

I would appreciate any tips/pointers/suggestions etc.

p.s.
I did submit a question to the WD support site, but as yet, have to hear
back.

Thanks.
Click to expand...


Ron:
And you've partitioned/formatted the new HDD, yes?
If you've done that, and the drive is still not recognized, have you
accessed Disk Management to see if you can assign a drive letter to that
drive?
If still no go, what's the model of the ASUS motherboard you're using?
Anna
 
Since I can't see the HDD anywere except in Device Manager and BIOS, how
would I format/partition it?

That being said, I did some more poking around the WD support site and came
across their LifeGuard utility. I downloaded it, and ran it, and it
reported it found a drive that was not prepared and should it do it. I
clicked OK, and I now have a new 500gb. hard drive!

I am still curious though about the formatting question. How would I have
done that?
For what it's worth it is an ASUS P5WD2 Premium with Dual Core Intel.

Also, I'm curious why Device Manager shows both my 'C' drive and my new 'K'
drive as being at Location 1(1). Is that normal?

Thanks for the reply.
 
Ron Stone said:
Since I can't see the HDD anywere except in Device Manager and BIOS, how
would I format/partition it?

That being said, I did some more poking around the WD support site and
came across their LifeGuard utility. I downloaded it, and ran it, and it
reported it found a drive that was not prepared and should it do it. I
clicked OK, and I now have a new 500gb. hard drive!

I am still curious though about the formatting question. How would I have
done that?
For what it's worth it is an ASUS P5WD2 Premium with Dual Core Intel.

Also, I'm curious why Device Manager shows both my 'C' drive and my new
'K' drive as being at Location 1(1). Is that normal?

Thanks for the reply.
Click to expand...


Ron:
I should have been clearer about that. I should have indicated that after
you installed the new HDD you would access Disk Management and that utility
would indicate that the new HDD had to be "initialized" before you could
partition & format the disk using the DM utility. Ordinarily the "Initialize
and Convert Disk Wizard" would automatically display when you accessed Disk
Management after installing a new unpartitioned/unformatted disk, but that's
not always the case.

Presumably the disk would have been reflected in the lower pane area of DM
(that reflects the Disk # of the new disk) and a red dot incorporating a
white bar would be present in that area indicating a disk that is not
initialized. Clicking on that would trigger the initialization process had
the "Initialize..Wizard" not appeared. I don't know if you did try to access
DM immediately following the installation of the new drive.

In any event, since you apparently were successful in
partitioning/formatting the drive with the WD utility, I take it all is well
at this point.

As to the DM Location of the disks, you can safely disregard those entries.
It's of no consequence. All that's really of consequence in this area is
that the OS detects the drive and assigns it a drive letter so that you can
work with the drive. I assume you're aware that you can assign a different
drive letter to that new secondary HDD through DM.
Anna
 
Did you Intitalize the drive?

Honu


Ron Stone said:
Since I can't see the HDD anywere except in Device Manager and BIOS, how
would I format/partition it?

That being said, I did some more poking around the WD support site and
came across their LifeGuard utility. I downloaded it, and ran it, and it
reported it found a drive that was not prepared and should it do it. I
clicked OK, and I now have a new 500gb. hard drive!

I am still curious though about the formatting question. How would I have
done that?
For what it's worth it is an ASUS P5WD2 Premium with Dual Core Intel.

Also, I'm curious why Device Manager shows both my 'C' drive and my new
'K' drive as being at Location 1(1). Is that normal?

Thanks for the reply.
Click to expand...
 
I wasn't aware of the Disk Management utility and checked it out.
That's a good thing to know. I have one free connector, I'll keep
that in mind if I decide to go for a fourth drive. Not that I need it.
I can't really justify the 500gb. drive, it's just that it was so cheap
for $100 new I couldn't pass it up.

Thanks for the tips.
 
Yes.
I finally found a WD utility that found the drive and formatted it for me so
I'm up and
running.

Thanks.
 
I can only offer what's been posted re my problem.
Does it show up in BIOS?
Does it show up in Device Manager?
Did you check Disk Management as suggested by Anna earlier?
Is it a new drive that doesn't work or an existing one that has gone
missing?
 
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