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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Drives > BIOS wont see hard drive

BIOS wont see hard drive

Forum Storage : Hard Drives BIOS wont see hard drive

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I have a Dell Optiplex 620 at home and I am having trouble getting my second hard drive to work.

My first hard drive boots in fine but my computer does not recognize the second in either the OS or the BIOS.

any tips on how to get my machine to recognize my second drive in the BIOS and/or the OS?

both of my hard drives I believe are sata (the jumper block has only 4 pins and says factory use only)

Reply to metallica435435
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With a sata device you should not have any jumpers on the drive. SATA drives use a thin data cable rather than a wide ribbon, is that what you have for both drives? What connection is the cd/dvd, also a thin cable, or a wide ribbon?

Also insure that in the bios the controllers are enabled.

Reply to Realbeast

Both drives are using a thin data cable but the cd/dvd drive is a wide ribbon.
Sorry, Im a little new but could you tell me how to "enable the controllers".
In the bios I made sure that Drive 0-6 were "enabled" is that what your refering too?

Reply to metallica435435

In the advanced setting, you can disable controller on many boards. Just make sure that none are disabled. You may want to try a different sata data connector and double check the sata power connector to get the drive to show up in the bios.

Then go into the disk management (part of administrative tools computer management control panel) and create a primary partition on the drive.

Reply to Realbeast

I didn't have a advanced settings section in my BIOS. and I knew that my SATA cable and power cable both worked because i used them on my primary drive a little while back just to test them.

what you said got me thinking though... and I restored my bios to factory settings to see if maybe there was a configuration in there that was messing things up and after i reset it it worked!!!!!
thank you so much!

Reply to metallica435435

metallica435435 wrote :

I didn't have a advanced settings section in my BIOS. and I knew that my SATA cable and power cable both worked because i used them on my primary drive a little while back just to test them.

what you said got me thinking though... and I restored my bios to factory settings to see if maybe there was a configuration in there that was messing things up and after i reset it it worked!!!!!
thank you so much!



Nice work, that's what it is really all about, thinking on the fly. :bounce:

Reply to Realbeast
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