New SATA hardrive is not recognized

I am trying to install a new 320 gig Western Digital hard drive into my computer. It has a ASUS k8v motherboard. I am adding it as a second drive for data storage. The primary drive is an IDE drive. The bios is not recognizing that there is a second drive installed and neither is windows xp pro.

Been trying to work it out for the last 2 nights and am about ready to toss it out the window. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Is the drive visible in Disk Management?

Is RAID enabled in your BIOS?

Have you read your owner's manual for the BIOS and SATA or RAID configurations?

Louis

The drive is not visible in disk management and the setup software that comes with it cannot see it either. The raid configurations software that runs before windows starts can see it but the software for raid that runs through windows cannot.

I've read and updated everything I could find, have put the jumper on the drive to slow it down to 150 MB/s (as suggested on the ASUS site) but nothing has affected it at all. I have not been able to get the ASUS bios updater to work for me yet, and I don't think the update I did download directly did anything.

The drive is getting power and is spinning up. I have had a SATA drive on this computer originally, but it died and I replaced it with 2 IDE drives, one of which is now dead. I was hoping to get a better transfer rate for home video capture so that is why I am trying the SATA drive.

If it's reflected in the RAID BIOS (which runs at boot) but is not reflected in Windows....and is not seen/reflected in the regular BIOS...my guess is that your BIOS settings have a RAID configuration set.

It's my guess that you need to figure out the proper adjustments in your main BIOS to reflect the drive as a non-RAID SATA drive.

Do you have a user manual for your board?

Louis

Edited by hamluis, 21 March 2009 - 03:19 PM.

Took some searching, but I did find the manual. SATA drives are mentioned several times. Once reguarding onboard device configuration which reads: OnChip SATA Boot ROM which can be either enabled or disabled. It was enabled before, but switching to to disabled changed nothing. The other section is telling me how to setup a RAID array with 2 SATA drives, but there is nothing there about only installing one drive.

Turns out that the simple answers are the best. After reading the manual thoroughly, I discovered that my mother board has two sets of SATA connectors, one for a raid array and another (hidden behind a cluster of wires) for normal connections. I had been using the raid set. Hooked up to the correct connector, everything is good.

Thanks very much Hamluis for your help. I would never have found the answer without digging out the manual like you suggested.

David

LOL...you probably don't remember the old RTFM days of the Internet...glad you solved it, happy computing .

Louis