Windows XP does not see my SATA hard drive. Bios does

I have an admitedly dated system. MSI K7 motherboard, Nvidia 6800 video card w/256 meg ram, 2 gigs of 400 mhz ram, a 4 gig eide WD hard drive and an 8 gig eide WD hard drive and an AMD 2.08 gig processor. I bought a WD 80 gig SATA hd to increase my storage capacity, since the MB supports SATA. But after physically installing it, only the bios recognizes it. It does not come up on My Computer and I have been unable to format and use the drive. This nepohyte needs the forum's assistance.

A quick check will tell you if Windows see's your drive (but still won't be visible to My Computer). Right click My Computer, select properties. At this point you should have the System Properties window open. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. Click on the plus sign next to Disk Drives to expand it. If both your HDD's show up here, then proceed to the next paragraph. If it doesn't, it means that your SATA driver isn't installed.

You need to partition that drive before it will show up in My Computer. To do this go into Control Panel and then Administrative Tools. Once in Administrative Tools launch Computer Management and you'll see under Storage, Disk Management, click it. At this point, you should see your second drive most likely labelled Disk 1 in the lower righthand pane. Right click it and choose Make Partition. I imagine that you'll want to use the entire space as one partition. Once the partition is made, you should be able to see it in My Computer. You can choose to format from within Disk Management by using the same procedure I described above for making the partition. Right click on your partition and select format, pick you format type (most likely NTFS) and let it rip. Hope that helps.

I AGREE!!!! Thanks for the easy to follow advice. Even though this thread is years old----it is still relevant to today. BRAVO and THANK YOU!!

I have to add one more agreement Your advice helped me much.But i have one tip,you don,t have to go to ctrl panel-then admin. tools ... you can just click right click on my compyter and then choose manage and you will go to computer management.
Best regards