Hi there I bought and installed a SATA hard drive the other day, but it is not being detected. It spins up fine, so it is receiving power. I have tried several SATA cables, and it still doesn't work. I have also tried different SATA ports on my motherboard. In the BIOS I have 2 disks listed - Ch00 is listed as SamsungHD103SJ, CH02 is listed as SamsungHD103SJ. Since both my HDDs are the same model, I don't know if those two drives are in fact my boot drive & the system partition, or if the BIOS is indeed detecting both drives. I've never installed a second hard drive in a system before so am not sure what to look for. Should I be looking for 4 drives listed - Drive 1, partition 1, drive 2, partition 1? Or simply the two individual drives? In computer management under storage, my drives are listed as C and the primary system partition of C. Not sure what to do :/ Cheers Adam
Both drives should appear in disk management. You need to format & assign a drive letter to the new one.
In disk management my second drive is not listed at all..... Just my first drive. Ok, so I downloaded Seagat's SeaTools to scan my drives. It can detect my second drive fine, I scanned it and it passed all the read tests, and can pull up all the information about it I need. I then checked back in device manager and it is showing up... But still not in computer management!!! So, I uninstalled it in device manager, and plugged it back in and restarted the computer. It refreshes and appears back in device manager list but still not in computer management. In Seatools, the only 2 things that are different are the serial number (duh) and more importantly the firmare edition. This is really the only thing I can see that could be the cause.... But even more weirdly, the new drive has a NEWER firwmare edition than my boot drive I don;t even knwo what is going on. Is there any way I can install new firmware myself, perhaps revert it back to the same firmware edition as my boot drive? Here is a screenshot of Seatools (click to expand: Orange is my boot drive, green is my second drive I just installed.
When you open the disk management did you not get the pop up to ask to format the disk and set it up? Is it not flashing on the task bar asking you to press next? Normally it just comes up and asks you to click next next format etc
Nope. Nothing like that. Let me attack screenshots to show you what I get: As the last screenshot showed, in Seatools it recognizes both drives. In device manager, I get this (Window in middle is second HDD, window on right is boot HDD): In computer management I get this: EDIT: Somewhat difficult to read but as you can see, there is only the one drive showing up in disk management, and it's primary system partition is 100MB. So it is showing up in device management and Seatools, but the one place I need it to be so I can format it and use it.... Well, it's not there!
Ahhh! I have had some success!! I launched the diskpart.exe utility through command prompt, used it to identify which disk was the new one (one without any partitions), and used the "clean all" function to clean and format the disk. It is in the process of cleaning right now, but I quickly launched disk management and it came up with the pop-up detailed above!!! I selected the option to format it but it said the operation could not be completed as it is being cleaned, so I will post back here if this method works. Thanks for your help!
For the record in the screen shot above the large black bar below your OS HDD is your new one, right click it...then format or new partition Then you will have access to your new drive once youve formatted it and given it a drive letter. Just for next time.
Well I formatted it all and it now works fine. It's a bit odd that it didn't automatically show up in disk manager or device manager at first though. It was only after I performed the following actiosn that it showed up in disk manager. For those wondering, or if you have this problem, do the following: Open command prompt Type "diskpart" to open the diskpart.exe utility Type "list disk" in diskpart Type "select disk (Whatever disk number you are selecting, e.g. 1) Type "det desk" to get the details of the disk to make sure it is the one you want. Type "clean all" to perform a re-format of the entire drive. Takes about 2.5 hours for a 1TB drive. Thanks again all! Adam
