sATA hardrive not detected with IDE drives.

EliteLamer

I have an 80 gig WD IDE drive as my master and another one as my slave. Then I put this old 36 gig Raptor on the sATA as a slave. It shows up as "Master Slave" but I can't use the drive. What am I doing wrong?

Seattle Thread

Check the BIOS's SATA options, make sure it's not set for RAID.

EliteLamer

It was never enabled when I installed the drive but I will check again.

Midshipman

I can't say that I have that much experience with SATA drives, but with IDE drives if you only have one of them on the controller, you would set it as the master (or cable select), not slave.

Also, have you looked in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage: Disk Management? Is the drive showing up in there?

capable heart

I thought that SATA didn't have the whole master/slave thing.

Type "compmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) into the Run menu and go the the option that says Disk Management. Make sure it's activated and assigned a drive letter, etc.

Also, maybe check the drive itself, physically. Is there some kind of jumper that's maybe set wrong? Are you using some kind of adapter that goes from PATA to SATA? ... that kind of stuff.

Seattle Thread

The drive could just be old, too, like you said. Does it spin when the power is on? Does it click? If there's no spin, or if it's clicking, it's dead, Jim.

EliteLamer

It is a 36gig WD Raptor 10k RPM. It is 3 years old but was only used for 2 years. Worked fine in my last computer. sATA has a jumper for slave and master.

EliteLamer

I can't say that I have that much experience with SATA drives, but with IDE drives if you only have one of them on the controller, you would set it as the master (or cable select), not slave.

The IDE drives work fine and I do have one as master and one as slave. This is what I have

IDE Master, IDE Slave, sATA slave. Detects the sATA as Master Slave. So it is a slave that is a master of the other slaves?

EliteLamer

capable heart wrote: »

I thought that SATA didn't have the whole master/slave thing.

Type "compmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) into the Run menu and go the the option that says Disk Management. Make sure it's activated and assigned a drive letter, etc.

Also, maybe check the drive itself, physically. Is there some kind of jumper that's maybe set wrong? Are you using some kind of adapter that goes from PATA to SATA? ... that kind of stuff.

Does not show up in storage at all. The only place I see it is in the Bios as "Master Slave"

It might be a jumper setting...

Pojaco

I had this problem before, can't remember the solution exactly. It involved going into Administrative Tools:

click on start
click on settings
click on control panel
click on administrative tools
click on computer management
click on disk management
look in the list for the new hard drive
right click on it
click assign drive letter
type in a drive letter
click okay

EliteLamer

It is not showing up at all in there and I tried all jump configs. I think I will just use it in another computer as master. I might set this one up as a raid for a file server.

pacbowl

Arn't there some WD SATA tools you need to load in order for windows to see the drive? I've installed some Maxtor SATA hard drives and you need to use that MaxBlast software. Otherwise the drive will show up in the bios, but not windows for some reason.

imbalanced

pacbowl wrote: »

Arn't there some WD SATA tools you need to load in order for windows to see the drive? I've installed some Maxtor SATA hard drives and you need to use that MaxBlast software. Otherwise the drive will show up in the bios, but not windows for some reason.

Yeah, I've had the problem too. Currently I'm using a RAID controller through Nvidia for one of my SATA drives even though I don't actually have the drive RAIDed. Windows XP doesn't always detect SATA anything, even up to SP2.

EliteLamer

Arn't there some WD SATA tools you need to load in order for windows to see the drive? I've installed some Maxtor SATA hard drives and you need to use that MaxBlast software. Otherwise the drive will show up in the bios, but not windows for some reason.

You are right, I forgot older versions of windows will not detect it without extra software.