Hard Drive Not Visable in My Computer

[Presyden]

Hi Gang

Just bought a new second SATA hard drive to replace my slave ATA drive.

I have gone through the set up process, but can't view the drive in My Computer. My plan was to have all three drives connected while I transfer the data from my old slave drive to my new slave drive.

I entered bios first and switched the setting for the second SATA drive from 'OFF' to 'AUTO'. When windows started up a little bubble popped up in the corner letting me know that the hard drive had been recognised (Samsung Spinpoint T HD501LJ). I checked My Computer after this to see if it was there, but it wasn't.

Before restarting the pc I checked Disk Drives in Device Manager and the disk was there. In the comments section it stated that the drive was working properly.

My primary disk is also a SATA drive.

I rechecked BIOS and sure enough the drive had been recognised. tried switching off the ATA drive but it didn't solve the problem.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

[MarkW78]

Hi,

You probably have to initialize and format it. I've had to do this when installing Seagate drives before.

First go to Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Locate the new disk in the bottom-right window. It will be the one that probably does NOT say "Healthy" or "Online" next to it.

Right click that drive and click "initialize"

Once that is done, if it still doesn't show up in the list above, you'll need to partition/format it. Right click the drive again and select format, a wizard pops up to help you through.

Hope that helps.

Mark

[Presyden]

Thank you very much Mark.

The disk is now working perfectly. Finally got a terabyte of hard drive space.

Presyden