Hardware

Ask something
Question Locked

bios or system not seeing drive

0 helpful
7 replies

by spud54

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
I have a dell XP410 running Vista Home Premium with a quad core processor and 3gb of ram and one hard drive (750gb). Although fitting a spare hd was not essential I decided to do it anyway as there were plenty of spare connections. The drive is set up with SATA connections but the spare drive which is only 80gb is an older ide connection. As there are no ide connections on the motherboard except a floppy, i used an adapter to connect the drive. Neither the BIOS or the OS see the drive and I have tried turning off the setup for raid drives in the bios and then the system won't boot at all. Is it just a case of the drive being too small/old or just plain incompatible

7 replies

by thechas

I presume that you are using a SATA to IDE adapter. As there is no way to run a hard drive off of the floppy port.

Make sure the IDE drive is jumpered to be a single drive and not a Master or a Slave.

Make sure your cables are connected, including power for the adapter.

Next, try a different SATA cable. While I myself have not had much trouble with them, a friend has had a lot of bad SATA cables.

Chas

by spud54

Yes you are right. I am using an adapter and so far I have used two cables but I take your point, Thanks

by oh smeg

Does this see the Drive? If it's a new drive you have to Prepare and Format it before the system will see it.

As for the BIOS not seeing it this may be correct particularly if the adapter requires a Software Solution to work.

Col

by spud54

Thanks for the prompt about cables Chas. I opened up the cabinet and sure enough, there were the original Dell cables alongside the new ones and they were different. I know this isn't what you meant but i had thought of trying a cable/connection that was already being used. So when I opened the cabinet and saw the difference in the cables I guessed the answer would be forthcoming. In theory there can be no difference between the two cables but as sure as eggs are eggs I swapped an original DVD drive with the new HD and both were recognised. Obviously there are still anomalies even in 2010 with PC configuration.

Thanks to all of you for your thoughts, usually the simplest answer is the best one.

by who am i really

Vantec IDE to SATA

http://www.vantecusa.com/gl/product/search?sk=CB-IS100

I've never had a problem with XP or Win2K

I don't and won't have vista or 7 so I can't speak to that part

but there's some chatter about vista / win7 not liking older HDDs
either IDE or SATA

whether it's marketing ploys or actual facts but a lot of newer HDDs have:
" Win Vista / 7 ready "
or
" Works with Vista / 7 "

on the cartons or ads

one thing you could try is attach it to a USB - IDE/SATA adapter
and then see if the new hardware thing pops up when you plug it into the live system

if it doesn't
then if you have or know someone who has an XP system that you could try it with you'd for sure find out if it's just plain toast

by spud54

I'll try the wife's pc if all else fails,

Thanks

This discussion is closed to new replies.