Recently my friend bought a Western Digital caviar black HDD. Taking no chances as it was a friends comp I grounded myself alot and installed the drive , being careful not to break any contacts or anything, it as usual in his comp. I made sure that the cables and such were plugged into their corresponding sockets and nothing seemed wrong. On turning the computer on XP promptly didn't find the new HDD. My immediate reaction was that I had not installed it correctly, so I installed it again, but alas came to the same problem. We then went into the BIOS and looked for attached storage, and to my surprise it didn't find anything, so I told the motherboard to load "optimal settings". On restarting the BIOS, the hard drive was promptly recognized, and so we exited and went into windows, but halfway through boot the computer just shut down. We restarted and the same thing happened. I had to reset the CMOS and the computer booted fine, but the drive was still not recognised. I Don't know much about how XP responds to storage so I might be overlooking something. Could the sudden shutdowns be an automatic response to the dreaded BSOD and should I tell my friend to re-install XP, to try and get his drive recognized?
what era is the motherboard? I had a headache with one of my old boards not supporting SATA-II and therefore refused to see the drive.
No, actually I haven't I cant see how if its not being recognized by the BIOS, can you explain further?
control panel >admin tools > computer management then look for 'Storage' and then Disk Management All drives connected should be listed in there, from here you can initialised and partitioned the drive.
You need to initialize the drive and format it before you'll be able to see it in My Computer. Here's how you do it. Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Here you'll see all the drives that are assigned a drive letter in addition to all unpartitioned disks. There will be a disk that is not assigned a drive letter. Right click on it and select "Initialize." After that, right click on that same disk and select format. You'll be presented with a few options: whether you want the disk to be an extended or primary partition (likely an extended partition in this case), whether you want the drive to be formatted as NTFS or FAT32 (NTFS recommended), and which drive letter you'd like to assign. After that, sit back and wait until the drive is formatted.
^ What they said. If it's not in Disk Management, check your SATA port (e.g., it might be plugged into a secondary (e.g., JMicron) SATA controller), your SATA cable, your drivers, and your SATA mode in the BIOS.
Righty sending those instructions to my friend right now, i will tell you what happens later. Thanks for all the replies anyway guys!
western digital green and black drives must use the jumpers on the back of the hard drive for windows XP .with out the jumpers beeing set XP will not see the drive or work with it advanced format jumper setting see link http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...TEuMTIzJnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=&p_topview=1#afdjump
If it doesn't show up in the BIOS, it won't show up in Disk Management. There has to be a question mark that either the disk is faulty or the BIOS isn't able to recognise a disc that large. Can you test it in your machine? (Although it looks like techhead may just have given you the answer!) Caroline
After sending those initialisation instructions to my friend he was eventually able to get the disk recognised in My computer and its in a useable state, without needing to use jumpers ( which I had read after he had formatted the drive) I'd like to thank all the people who took the time to post and help
no problem M8 the jumper are only use to get the full speed of the hard drive and to help windows size the drive I have the WD 800gb green hard drive with 64mb cache and i had to use the jumper setting to get the full boot speed
Oh, thats interesting then, I shall inform my friend of this incase he has a spare set of jumpers ( I don't thing the hard drive came with one)
The reason for this is because each individual SATA drive is assigned it's own channel, versus the old days when you could put as many as four drives on a channel, so you had to tell the motherboard which one is the master and which ones are the slaves. Most hard drives, if no jumper is set, automatically reverts to a master drive state, which is perfectly fine for SATA drives as they don't share channels.
