XP Pro cannot see my 120GB SATA Drive when using a PCI controller!!

[mikeyjb8]

XP Pro cannot see my 120GB SATA Drive when using a PCI controller!!

I have just bought and connected up a PCI controller card for Serial ATA (2CH). As my motherboard did not have the Serial ATA connection.

I have connected up a 120GB SATA Drive and it all looks good until I get to windows... The drive is listed in Device Manager but I cannot see it in my computer in order to format the drive and start using it!!

Am I missing something stupid here?

Thanks in advance!
:hotbounce

Motherboard = Gigabyte GA-7VT600(-L)

Sorry to waste all your time!!

 

[Samstoned]

hdd manufacturer should have a utility to format drive or 3rd party software like acronis,paragon
check to make sure your MB bios supports boot from scsi or LS120.
not sure some MB's see pci controlers as scsi.

 

[Rick]

Drives require partitions to be used in Windows, otherwise there is no usable space on them and Windows does not assign a drive letter.

You can create a partition by clicking Start/Run and typing diskmgmt.msc and pressing enter. (This is the same thing as going to control panel / administrative tools / computer management / disk manager, by the way)

In the bottom window pane, you'll see Disk 0, Disk 1 etc.. One of these disks will be blank and unpartitioned. You'll want to right click on the disk in question and you should be able to "initialize" it. This will create a partition and then you can format the drive, which makes the drive readable/writable to Windows.

Here's a write-up by Microsoft about the utility and how to use it:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348