Help with new second hard drive please!

madmum33

I installed a new second hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 530 desktop yesterday morning, all went well with plugging in power cable and SATA cable and I set it up with a single partition (1.5Tb Seagate) and formatted through disk management, which took all day.

All looked fine, I started transferring files to free space on my primary drive (320gb Samsung SATA) and it all showed up. I shut down the computer as normal last night, and the drive was still showing with data this morning when I turned it on this morning. I continued transferring files and deleted them from the primary drive (they had also been backed up to an external drive) then XP threw out a "delayed write failure" message and the drive had completely vanished.

I tried a reboot but initially it froze, it couldn't find the boot volume which is my primary drive. Trying again I went into the boot menu at startup and manually selected the Samsung drive. The Seagate is still not showing anywhere, not even in disk management.

So, any ideas? Could it be as simple as a loose connection?

Thanks in advance!

Ruth

madmum33

This is really weird, it's just shown up again!

pcombo

If theres a jumper on the drive try removing it.

victor2

You could try swapping the two drives over on the SATA connections, then changing the boot sequence in the BIOS accordingly. But if there's no problem now, it's going to be hard to trace.
I have two drives in my Inspiron - the second one is a Seagate 1Tb. I'm running Windows 7, but both drives have worked flawlessly, even without swapping them over.

Edit. There's a microsoft article which might be related to it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330174

madmum33

pcombo, what would a jumper look like?

victor2, should I have changed something in the BIOS already? I haven't done anything like that, just set it all up in disk management.

Toxteth_OGrady

Is your new drive a Seagate 7200.11? If yes, what's the date of manufacture on the label?

victor2

madmum33 wrote: »

pcombo, what would a jumper look like?

victor2, should I have changed something in the BIOS already? I haven't done anything like that, just set it all up in disk management.

Didn't have to in mine. The BIOS just detected the correct model Seagate and I was ready to use it. I'll have to check what my BIOS settings are, but it just worked.

madmum33

Toxteth OGrady, no, it's a 5900.II - this one

davb

I don't think jumpers will be the issue on a SATA drive, they usually just control the speed to 300 or 150.

The boot order in the BIOS needs to be set with the primary drive (Samsung) before the Seagate, although this would usually be the case anyway, as the original drive should have been on SATA port 0, and the new one probably on 1.

You could recheck the connections, but I would be tempted to download the manufacturers (both of them) diagnostics, usually a boot CD, and check the drives are not faulty. You may also be able to do it by booting from the Dell diagnostic partition.

victor2

I changed nothing in the BIOS for mine apart from the boot sequence. It started out with the supplied 320GB drive as SATA-0 and I added a 500GB as SATA-1 and made that the first boot device once I'd put Win 7 on it. The 320GB drive had Vista on it, but that's another story.
Then I replaced the 320GB disk with the 1TB one. Just use it as a backup drive now and put a 50GB partition on it to boot Linux from when I feel that way inclined.

Toxteth_OGrady

@OP

Can you here any loud random clicking from your new drive? You may have to open up your case to hear it.