I just bought a Samsung SpinPoint 250 GB SATA hard drive last night from Micro Center. The windows installation disk will not detect it. I have a Abit VT-7 mobo, which does support SATA. I used the included driver floppy to boot with the installation disk, but it refuses to recgonize it. I'm going to try to flash the BIOS, but I wanted to know if ya'll had any other ideas.



This post has been edited by BuffaloHELP: Jan 11 2006, 02:21 AM

Is the hard drive detected in the bios?
Are all the cables connected properly?
What OS do you have?
If you have raid'ed hard drives and plugged this into the same onboard controller, you also might have some issues there.

Very important this to note is: does the BIOS recognize this hard drive? Is the drive powered? These are stupid questions, but you'd be amazed how often this is the solution to problems...

Give us some more info, what's your OS version (I guess it's Win XP), what other drives you have plugged in...

I use Serial ATA as well, a 200 and a 300 gig.. they wont be automatically detected, or at least they arent on my CMOS. What I do is enter the bios, go to Intergrated Periphials (sp?) then IDE devices, then you must set the Serial ATA option at the bottom.. its defaulted to 'Disable' which is why it wont work.. select 'Auto' or something else and it should work..

sorry I didn't post earlier, I've been trying to get my old hard drive back up and running. I found out that I had a faulty mobo, but I just decided to take that SATA hard drive back, and try to fix the old one.

Hey there!

Just installed a new SATA drive on my little brothers system. Was quite confused at first because the drive showed up in bios, and windows blipped about new hardware, but it would not show up at "my computer".

Here is how I got it working: Right click my computer on the desktop, choose manage (Might be some other, synonumous, word. I don't use an english version of windows and this is my own translation).
You get a window with lots of options and tools. In the tree-structure to the left, somewhere around the bottom, is Disk Manager (Again, own translation).
Click Disk Manager and all the disks on your system should show up in the window to the right. You may have to scroll down to see all drives.
Find the new drive and choose format.

I formated it to one big partition, NTFS, and all of a sudden windows stops acting like a spoiled child and the drive shows up in My Computer.

Weird, I've never had to do this before. Anyone knows why it's acting like this? It was a WD 500GB SATA drive btw. Maybe it was too big for windows to handle it plug'and'play style?

-reply by Mayhay