Help - New Internal Hard Drive not working

feival

I have a brand new 160Gb Maxtor stm3160211as hard drive installed and it isn't working. I installed the drive in to my Dell XP PC using a SATA cable and the available power cable. I have since adjusted the BIOS to turn the drive on.

When I am in explorer the drive doesn't show. However, when I right click on the c drive and select the hardware drive this new drive does appear on the list suggesting I have installed it correctly but not configured something. Also, when I go into system info details of the drive are shown - see screenshot - the problematic drive is the second one down. The first drive is the factory fitted c drrive.


Also, I have checked in control panel, system, device manager and thhis seems to suggest it is ok too - see screenshot of this too.

I haven't formatted the drive or partitioned it. I have no idea if I need to do that and if so how to do that - literally it has come straight out of the box and into the PC. After I kicked off the PC Windows did a load of checks on it automatically using checkdisc I think. Please can someone tell me what I have done wrong and how I can get this new drive to work!! Thanks.

Chippy_Minton

Start - Run - type diskmgmt.msc - OK and partition and format it.

MercilessKiller

If that doesnt work, could this be a jumper problem?

IamWHOiSayIam

MercilessKiller wrote: »

If that doesnt work, could this be a jumper problem?

If the drive is SATA this should not be a problem. (You generally leave to factory settings unless you have reason otherwise.)

Chippy_Minton advice is worth following.

MercilessKiller

Oops didnt see it was SATA.. bad me

feival

Thanks to all. That did the trick. I ran that utility and immediately realised I needed to "initialise" the disk. Took all of 5 seconds. So tell me, why on earth was this not mentioned anywhere in the installation instructions etc. and how is a basic user meant fto find that utility. Thank G-d for fora like this one. My next task is to see if I can set this up in a RAID configuration. I now have two 160Gb hard drives and I understand that with RAID one drive will always be a precise mirror of the other.

MercilessKiller

Mirroring is a type of Raid so make sure you dont set it to the wrong type ^-^

amcluesent

Microsoft publish a good guide to RAID-1 (mirrored volumes) with Windows XP - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424/

feival

Thanks. I had a look at my Dell menu and it explains it quite well. The main issue is that I will lose any data on my pre-existing single hard drive. I will delay doing this until I have time to spend (aka waste) on this with back ups and the complete system reinstall etc. etc.