Hello all, I got a new hard drive for my Windows PC. The computer is running Windows XP Home Edition. The Motherboard is a DFI nForce 4. The new drive is a SATA WD Caviar 320GB. This drive does not show up in BIO's. It is properly connected. I have the same drive exept 250GB's, which the operating system is currently running on. That drive is visible, meanwhile the 320 is not. Any support would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Have you tryed swapping the power connectors and sata cable around from your old drive, or even disconnecting the old one and just trying the new one to see if its a connection problem, or power problem, but i doubt that as you have more than enough. If the old one is disconnected, and the new one on its own, still doesn't show up in the bios, then i would return it, if it does, then i'm guessing a cable problem somewhere.
well first of all make sure your bios is updated to the latest version if possible. if your drive is not detected after trying to swap cables, power and updating then it's possible that the 320GB drive is faulty so you'll have to take it back. i had 250, 350, 500 and 1TB hdd's on my old Nforce4 by XFX and no problems.
When plugged in individually, they both work and boot to the OS. The other drive (320GB) has Windows XP installed also but I would like to format it for storage.
right click on my computer > go manage > left of window go to > disk management > right click on the new HDD > initialize > right click again then format quick wait couple secs done.
can you try the drive in another computer to rule out the possibility of your board not supporting SATA2 drives, On some Seagate drives there is a little jumper to set it to SATA1 to SATA2.
1) Make sure your sata port is enabled. 2) if it is, maybe it is the competing versions of windows on the drives that cause a problem. I'd run an ubuntu CD and format the 320. Just to be on the safe side (cause I don't know much about ubuntu but trial-and-error) I would unplug the other drives so you can't mess up. 3) then maybe you can boot with both and format the 320 again in windows and be done. Good luck. The ubuntu trick has helped me in the past. In fact, when my bios has the SATA ports for the HDD disable for some reason ubuntu can still see the drive and access... scary cause I didn't want to accidentally format the wrong drive (i have 2 x 750GB).