PC wont boot after SATA drive installed

[davidmgray]

Help!

Bought a new 1tb disk drive (WD) for my HP pavillion PC running Vista home premium. I want to use this a a secondary drive and leave the OS on the existing 500gb disk.

Motherboard is SATA so I popped the drive and and booted up, all went ok.
The drive was not recognised by windows do I went into Accessories | Computer management and formatted the WD drive. Rebooted and the PC wont start. If I unplug the WD the PC boots fine.

Hope you can be of help because I really need this drive to be working soon.

I've even removed the WD from the BIOS bootup sequence so that the PC does not try to boot from the drive which has no OS.

I've not changed any of the jumpers as I understood that SATA did not need these changing.

Regards
David

 

[syzygy]

You're right, SATA drives do not have jumpers. From your description, it appears that in setting up the drive, you configured it to be the boot drive. You should have received a CD with Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools with the drive. It is much easier to partition and format from that software -- and it specifically asks if you wish to make the drive a boot drive or use it for data storage. Why don't you install the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools and then open it. It will see the Western Digital drive and you can have it partition and format all over. When it asks if you wish to make the drive the boot drive, choose to make it a data drive and I think your problems will be over. I just did these steps yesterday with a new WD1001FALS 1 TB black drive and it is working perfectly -- for archive use. Not quite as fast as the 640 GB (as measured by HDTach) but a very fast drive none the less.

 

[raybay]

All the Western Digital sofware is downloadable... Get a friend to load it for you and put it on a flash drive.

 

[captaincranky]

The situation you're describing has never happened to me. So, take this for what it's worth given my either lack of experience or just plain dumb luck.

I've never had to use any drive manufacturer's software to have a HDD recognized as a volume drive.

First, the file path you describe for formatting doesn't seem right, (at least if you're using XP). This would be > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance> Administrative Tools > Computer Management> Storage > Disk Management.

Second, the boot drive should be plugged into the SATA "0" port. The new drive into SATA "1".

The symptoms you're describing sound like a problem in the computer's BIOS. Perhaps the BIOS is set to RAID. This would cause the symptoms you're describing. The BIOS should be set to "run as IDE".

In any event, it wouldn't hurt to check.