I just bought another two 1T SATA drives, and installed them. That means I have 4 drives, my PC installed the driver software etc, and I can see them in my BIOS just not next to my first 2 drives. I'm kind of stuck on things I can do. Any help?
Harddrive Issues
- Thread starter Neche
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I'm guessing you mean that you do not see them in "My Computer"?
Have you formatted them?
Easy way to check is to go to
Control Panel-->
Administrative Tools-->
Computer Management-->
Storage-->
Disk Management
If the color next to drive is black and says Unallocated and has no letter assigned to it, needs to be formatted.
Right click the drive you want to format, pick "Format Partition" from the list. A wizard will pop up, you want to make a "Primary Partition". You will want NTFS file system.
After the process is done, the drives will then appear in "My Computer" and be usable.
Have you formatted them?
Easy way to check is to go to
Control Panel-->
Administrative Tools-->
Computer Management-->
Storage-->
Disk Management
If the color next to drive is black and says Unallocated and has no letter assigned to it, needs to be formatted.
Right click the drive you want to format, pick "Format Partition" from the list. A wizard will pop up, you want to make a "Primary Partition". You will want NTFS file system.
After the process is done, the drives will then appear in "My Computer" and be usable.
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That's actually the first thing I would check, especially if they're brand new, unformatted drives and visible in the BIOS.
I got weird problems recently with some Western Digital drives popping in and out of auto-detect in the BIOS, but it was pretty obvious that the problem was the drive itself.
In that case, yeah, check that first in Windows or w/e operating system you're using since they won't show up by default in it unless they are formatted.
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Out of curosity what OS? What version? x86 x64? According to this: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=656490
You could be having a too much available space issue. without seeing the computer itself i can't make any other idea's
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You could be having a too much available space issue. without seeing the computer itself i can't make any other idea's
The drive would still show up if it was formatted and assigned a drive letter, but as a smaller drive than what it actually was.
So what was the problem with your drive? This thread might help someone later if they encounter same problem.
I took a long, very long route.
Since the drives weren't partitioned which I remembered once I posted the thread, they weren't showing up. I didn't want to download a program to format them for me, so I just put in an old XP boot disc, and formatted that way haha. Note: Never choose the long way to format a 1T drive. I did so by accident and it took a mighty long time.
Since the drives weren't partitioned which I remembered once I posted the thread, they weren't showing up. I didn't want to download a program to format them for me, so I just put in an old XP boot disc, and formatted that way haha. Note: Never choose the long way to format a 1T drive. I did so by accident and it took a mighty long time.
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I'm having a similar problem with a WD 1T drive, only it's not popping in and out of auto-detect in the bios. Instead, it's disconnecting whenever I try to copy anything to it...
I was able to copy stuff to it before, and I can read existing data from it with no problem. Is this an issue with most WD drives now? Any ideas to fix this or should I just junk it and get a new one?
Carste
It could be a variety of problems, so i have a few questions for you.
Is windows giving you an error message? If yes, what is it's exact wording? If no error, explain in detail what happens.
How many hard drives do you have hooked up, and is this 1Tb running you OS? What exactly are you using it as?
Is it PATA (thin wide ribbon cable) or SATA (skinny serial cable)? What is the hard drive's model number?
What OS are you using and what Service Pack are you using?
It could be a variety of problems, so i have a few questions for you.
Is windows giving you an error message? If yes, what is it's exact wording? If no error, explain in detail what happens.
How many hard drives do you have hooked up, and is this 1Tb running you OS? What exactly are you using it as?
Is it PATA (thin wide ribbon cable) or SATA (skinny serial cable)? What is the hard drive's model number?
What OS are you using and what Service Pack are you using?
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Sorry I could have given all of the pertinent information originally. Here it is:
The drive is a sata model wd10eacs-00zjb0,
does not have the OS installed on it,
it's just a storage drive and I only have 2 drives in this machine,
running XPx64 sp2,
and I just get a message saying the hardware has been removed (similar to an external storage device).
I'm thinking (hoping) it's the write buffer on the drive since it can write about 4megs before dropping. If you have any other ideas of what the problem could be let me know.
The drive is a sata model wd10eacs-00zjb0,
does not have the OS installed on it,
it's just a storage drive and I only have 2 drives in this machine,
running XPx64 sp2,
and I just get a message saying the hardware has been removed (similar to an external storage device).
I'm thinking (hoping) it's the write buffer on the drive since it can write about 4megs before dropping. If you have any other ideas of what the problem could be let me know.
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I wouldn't bet anything on that. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to do many tests on the drives with the problem in question. Also they were used as main drives in the pcs I built. They were constantly being undetected by the BIOS (clearly not a motherboard problem since we use a lot of ASUS and Gigabyte models at my work). The only time I managed to get to an OS past installation it was slow as hell and got a BSoD after maybe 1-2 mins and I had to manually select the drive in the BIOS to even get that far. The drive acted like it was corrupted to death.
I don't say that WD makes bad drives at all. I just noticed that I had more troubles recently with those drives than with Seagate or any other brand. I can't confirm anything, but I heard someone at my work talking about a LBA problem with that series of drive in certain batches. Apparently it would show up only like 32mb or something, so it could make sense that when you write something on it, it will stop since it can't write more than 32mb.
The only flaw in this, is the fact that the drive is dropping totally out of the radar after this. Did you try to reformat the drive since the first time or tried it in a different pc (since it's a storage device anyway)? Did you try to change your SATA data cable? I assume that your motherboard is recent too and you don't have to put a jumper on the drive for the cap overflow to get a SATA300 to a SATA150 speed (I saw some really weird behavior with certain old motherboards) but I'm pretty sure new drives doesn't have them anymore anyway, I never really paid attention, but who knows.
That or the drive is fucked up and you'll need to do an RMA on it lol.
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