SATA drive isn't recognized.

[Cap79]

I just bought a new oem 500gb sata drive. To make a long story short, I just want to clone my (IDE) c: drive onto the new 500gb sata and then get rid of the ide.

Problem is, windows can't seem to see the sata drive properly. It shows up in Device Manager just fine, says it is enabled, functioning correctly, drivers up to date and shows the correct amount of space and so on. But it is missing completely from My Computer and Disk Manager. How do I get it recognized?

I'm running WinXP Pro with the newest updates. Thanks...

 

[doormatderek]

It should be there in Disk Management. You probably need to create a partition and then format the drive.
Right click My Computer, click MANAGE. Click on Disk Management on the left side of that window, and tell me if you see it there..

 

[Cap79]

It's not in Disk Management. Only my ide hdds and my dvd drive.

 

[doormatderek]

So where can you see it? "Disk manager"? Did you connect both data and power cables to the drive?

 

[Cap79]

Data and power are both connected.

By "disk manager" I meant "disk management", sorry. The only place I can see it is Device Manager.

 

[Captain-M]

Hello Cap79. There are 2 things here. First, if you power up your system, go into your BIOS (DEL, F10, depending on system). Your mobo should allow both Serial- and parallel-ATA. If your board has "Enhanced" IDE features, it will show as 4th or 5th HDD (combining PATA). Try another SATA port as well, and ensure power as well. Make sure your XP HDD is the primary Boot disk. In addition, when in windows, right-mouse click My Computer, Manage, Disk Management in left pane. It is not partitioned, or "Active". When the HDD list is there, hopefully your HDD will be listed in right pane. Right mouse click your new drive "unpartitioned" and partition and format (usually NTFS, and "quick format" if desired). From there your drive is ready to go. After that, any 3rd party disk copy s/w (Ghost, TrueImage and the like) will copy your disk. I like Barts Boot Disk. Good luck.

 

[Zorg]

Get the DOS based CD from the new HD manufacturer. Burn the ISO with ISO Recorder or other ISO burning software. Boot to the CD and use the tools to clone the old drive to the new one. Remove the old drive change the boot order and your done.

 

[Cap79]

Alright well thanks for replies everyone. I have solved the problem of the SATA drive not being recognized. I will post what I did here in case anyone runs into the same thing...

I had to partition it using diskpart from the cmd line because nothing else in XP could see the drive. After that it showed up in Disk Manager, but with no drive letter, so I had to manually assign it a letter, reformat it, set it to active, and reformat it again. Now after all that it's atually working properly.

 

[Zorg]

If you are going to clone the drive you are just wasting your time. Follow the steps in my post. It's easy and fast.