SATA hard drive not recognized

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hi
ive purchased a new Western digital 320gb SATA hard drive for my sons pc to replace a ide 80gb hard drive.
When connected and boots up the hd starts clicking and the light on pc stops flashing.
In the Bios the hd is showing with no name or size.
When i try and load xp from the disc it eventually starts to load then comes up with hard drive error.
Can you please advise if a faulty hard drive ?
 
The problem is likely a driver issue. Windows XP comes with few SATA/RAID controller drivers so it doesn't recognize hard drives connected to SATA connectors on most motherboards. One way around it is to go into the BIOS and change the controller mode to IDE. If you can do that, Windows setup should continue as if you installed an IDE drive.
 
Do you, by chance, have a driver problem strictly because the SATA driver you need does not come embedded in the Windows XP installation package. One thing to consider remember when installing XP is that no XP CD supports SATA drives natively. It has to be rebuilt in to the CD or installed before using a regular CD.
 
Is the old 80GB hard still working? Could you put it back in and try to use Disk Management to format the new hard drive? This would test the new drive. If it won't format, the hard drive might be defective.

BTW, if you've already tried some remedies and they didn't work, please include them in your post so we don't waste your time suggesting things you've already tried.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back