Add a Serial ATA hard drive to existing XP setup

[silverlakeguy40]

Help!

I bought a Seagate serial ATA hard drive and the appropriate cables to add to my system as an additional hard drive. I attached the cables to the drive, and to the motherboard and powered up. The drive is spinning. My system (Windows XP sp2) does not see the drive.

The first time, I set the jumper on my existing IDE hard drive to be the master, assuming that the new SATA would be the slave. When I tried to boot up and went into BIOS, it did not see the new drive (auto detect did not find it) and the pc did not complete booting up. I shut down, put the jumper back to make it the only hard drive, then booted, and read more about SATA drives. I thought that maybe the SATA will just co-exist with the current drive, so I just tried rebooting .... no luck.

Since the motherboard had SATA plugs, I assumed I was good to go, but am not sure now....

Have tried looking it up on Microsoft website and thru google, but not much useful/appropriate info.

Can someone help me, please?

 

[dualmeister]

You do not have to change any jumpers on your old IDE drive when adding the SATA drive. SATA drives run on their own port, i.e. you can only have one per cable.

It is possible that SATA is disabled by default in the BIOS. I have seen many boards like this.

Another reason it might not show up in the BIOS is if the SATA ports are set to RAID then the chipset might have its own SATA BIOS which should come up after the main BIOS.

Once you can see the drive check what chipset is controlling your SATA ports and load the latest drivers for that chipset in your operating system.

 

[Juggy]

Might also be that you need to go into computer management and write a signature to the disk so that XP can actually see it.

Right click on my computer and click "manage". Then highlight the "Disk management" option in the console tree and see if it ask you to write a signature to the disk.

 

[The_Techie]

No need to change jumpers. Just plug the SATA drive into the PC and go to Disk Management and see if Windows detects it. If it does, right-click on the drive and create a partition

 

[SanchoP]

As the others said, no need to worry about master/slave. What chipset? If it's a pretty old mobo, you might need to change a jumper to force the hard drive to run in SATA1 mode. When your computer boots up, does it show the hard drive? It should say what CPU is there, followed by the RAM, and then all storage devices. If it does, then you just need to go into management console like suggested above.

If, however, it doesn't, you'll need to go into the BIOS (press Del during the above mentioned screen).

 

[silverlakeguy40]

Update on SATA drive install

Update: After your responses, I investigated the chipset, and found the sub-menu in the BIOS that showed SATA... and the option selected was RAID. I changed that to IDE and re-booted.

When I booted up, after the memory check, the normal hard drive was listed, then in a sub-section, the SATA hard drive with 320 gb was also listed.

However, I went into disk management as you all suggested, and do not see that drive listed... jsut the old hard drive and the two dvd drives.

Any more suggestions? Should I had called it IDE in the first place?

(In case it matters, it's a Seagate SATA drive, and I have Phoenix Tech Award BIOS...)

Thanks!

 

[NoRulez]

Install your MOBO's software RAID drivers. Came across this issue on a few systems and the software raid seemed to resolve - strange...
Then maybe not so strange, as all those had VIA chipsets
Maybe you'll just have to re-enable RAID in the BIOS.
Looks like some chipsets don't want to talk to SATA devices without the RAID drivers being installed, not that they are used for config in any way.

 

[Thestealth]

@NoRulez - I agree with you on that one. Have experienced that myself with SATA drives. Drive should show under disk management then, go for a format and presto!

 

[The_Techie]

If it sees it in the BIOS and Windows isn't seeing it, install all your chipset drivers such as RAID.