Can't Use My New Drive

L

Lord Chambers

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 4, 2003
Messages
112
I just got my Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 250gb SATA 8mb 7200RPM drive but I can't see it in My Computer.

My mobo is aMSI 875 Neo-FIS2R and has two SATA connectors on the southbridge, which I currently have two 80gb drives in RAID 0 on. Now I'm trying to install this Deskstar onto the onboard Promise controller. So I enabled that in the BIOS, restarted Windows, and it detected the Promise controller. I was prompted to install the driver for it, so I pop in the driver CD that came with the mobo, and instead of auto-installing it prompts me to pick from this list:
options.jpg

I pick the first one, and reboot, and the drive still doesn't show up. I uninstall that driver, install the next one, and that doesn't work either.

Occasionally, maybe every 5 minutes or so, the drive makes a whining sound like a dying cat. It lasts about 3 seconds. That's the only noise it makes.

Since I've installed the only two drivers for XP that I can choose from, DLed and installed the latest driver from the Promise website, and I still can't see the drive, any other ideas? Or perhaps the drive is shot, since it makes a sound I've never heard before (although I'm inexperienced with high capacity drives like this)?
 
The noise is common to Hitachi/IBM units, I believe it is a thermal recalibration it does every so often. Nothing to worry about unless it annoys you. Anyway, new drives don't just appear in My Computer, they have to be partitioned and formatted first with Disk Manager (under computer management). The only other thing that I can see is that you didn't say whether the controller detected the drive. If it's not, fix that first.
 
Originally posted by Snugglebear
The noise is common to Hitachi/IBM units, I believe it is a thermal recalibration it does every so often. Nothing to worry about unless it annoys you. Anyway, new drives don't just appear in My Computer, they have to be partitioned and formatted first with Disk Manager (under computer management). The only other thing that I can see is that you didn't say whether the controller detected the drive. If it's not, fix that first.
Click to expand...
OMG! I see it! It's there in Disk Manager! All of it in it's 232gb glory!!! I only wish I knew what to do now!

OOOOOH I'm formatting now!
 
Disk and Storage Management
note all of these are almost equally appicable to NT W2K and XP and the content varies considerably (Storage Management in particular )
Disk Management Basics NT
Storage Management W2K
Disk Management Overview XP > expand security & Administration > Disk Management in the pane to the left for all the reference

and when youve mastered that try MMC ;)

PS the quick way is
Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc >Enter
 
Yep, I'm good to go. I've got everything I want to save backed up to the new drive.

But now I have a new problem. When I boot off my XP CD and try to format, it tells me it can detect no drives. That's messed up. In windows I can use both my RAID and this new drive fine. Yet in the XP setup it can't find either. Suggestions?
 
so basically all 3 are on 2 different RAID controllers?
the CD lacks the drivers?
 
The RAID 0 is connected via the ICH5R (hope that's right) chipset that makes up the "southbridge" of my motherboard. It only has two SATA connectors though, so for this third drive, I had to connect it via the Promise controller.

The XP CD should have the drivers to at least see the RAID 0, because I had no problems installing Windows on that RAID months ago.

I guess I'll go rip the floppy out of my mom's computer and hook it up to mine so I can press F6 to install 3rd party drivers. The more I think about that the more it makes sense that's what my problem is.

Maybe I'll try to make an ultimate boot disk. That'd be [H]ard.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top