New SATA not seen by WinXP or SATA Controller

[kep55]

I installed a Samsung Spinrite SATA HD 250 GB in to my system. I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NS-Pro mobo w/nVidia Geforce 250 3 chip set. I used the F6 method to load the nVidia drivers. The Silicon Image and Gigabyte drivers were already installed. None of the controllers nor WinXP sees the disk. It' getting power. Suggestions?

 

[GuyAmI]

You can maybe try updating the Silicon Image and Gigabyte drivers.

If you already have some SATA devices then you may want to try swapping ports. Take a device that you know is working and unplug it then plug the Samsung into that port. If that doesn't work you can always try all of the ports.

 

[kep55]

I have the latest drivers installed. I put in a new SATA cable, and removed the pass-through power connector molex that came with the HD fan so the power is going directly to the SATA. I can hear the thing spin up, but so far nothing wakes it up.

 

[GuyAmI]

What about in BIOS? Can you see it there?

 

[kep55]

Come to think of it, no. During boot, both the SI controller and nVidia controller say no arrays found. The BIOS is Award F13 and I have the SATA enabled.
"Curiouser & curiouser", said Alice.

 

[GuyAmI]

Unless you have a RAID array I think that's what it's talking about when you see the message 'no arrays found'.

When you go into your BIOS (by pressing Delete), then to Standard CMOS Features, nothing shows up? The HDD isn't recognized?

Do you have the RAID function disabled?

 

[kep55]

I decided to start over and reinstall the SATA drive. It turns out the power lead I used at first was tagged "Fans Only". I switched leads, and the drive is seen as stated below.
On Boot, the Silicon Image says it sees the Samsung SATA drive. In BIOS it's set as BASE. In Windows XP SP2, it's seen under Device Manager but not under My Computer.
I used Ghost 12 to copy the entire C drive to the SATA (J) drive, including the MBR. I did that so I can ditch the current Maxtor C drive which was dieing. Would how I formatted and copied the J drive be giving Windows fits? The partition is set to active.

 

[GuyAmI]

Possibly, although you will need make sure that the correct drive letter is correctly associated. But first...

click 'Start' --> click 'Run' --> type: compmgmt.msc --> in the left hand frame, select 'Disk Management'

Now in the bottom-right frame, do you see the new drive? If you do and it's got a label of something like 'Drive not allocated', 'Not allocated', or some such, then the cloning didn't take.

If for some reason it didn't take you can either do a full format and re-install windows directly onto the new drive (lengthy but pretty much guranteed to work) or you can use a cloning programme like Partition Magic or Acronis True Image.

 

[kep55]

WinXP "stole" the drive letter previously assigned to a network drive and assigned it to the SATA drive. I didn't realize this until I saw the net drive had gone fron 100 GB to 250 GB. I'm so glad MS pays attention to reality.

 

[GuyAmI]

In this case it should just be a simple matter of changing the drive letter of the SATA drive to C:

You're not supposed to be able to do this in Windows but there is a workaround. Change Boot Drive Letter

Normally I'd say that you should backup your important data since messing with the registry could keep you from accessing the drive afterwards. But since you still have your Maxtor drive and it hasn't died yet that shouldn't be a problem.

Just make sure that the SATA is set to a high enough priority in BIOS so that you boot off of it.

 

[kep55]

I was just going to post a question along those lines. Thanks for the link about changing the C drive. It saves me from changing the links on a few hundred shortcuts.