Hard drive not working

I just bought a serial ata hard drive and got it in the mail today, so I hooked it all up and now when I start my computer it detects it but I go to my computer once it is started up and the drive is not in there. Somebody please help!

Have you formatted this drive? What os are you using?

If you have Windows XP then r-click my computer and choose manage. Then choose disk management, and you should be able to format the disk.

I had that exact same mistake installing my new HDD

if you have win98 get a bootdisk and bung it in on startup then follow the logical steps.

I have windows xp and have not formatted it, but when I went to disk management the only drive that was in there was my original one.

But it is detected in the bios? Make sure you have your jumpers set correctly. If you are using both drives on cable select then try putting them on master / slave.

The ide hard drive is set as slave as I am writing this and the sata one didnt come with a jumper or what each setting is, and it says that it is for factory use only. The motherboard jumper is on the right setting. I am going to try finding out where to put the jumper on the sata drive

Now I know what the problem is but not how to fix it. I have to set it up in the CMOS setup, but I can't find anything in there where I can set it up for a SATA hard drive. My motherboard is a SOYO SY-P41 845PE.

Have you looked on Soyo's website? http://www.soyogroup.com/downloads/sele ... 2&col3=All

You may need an update for your mobo. The documentation from that page should tell you anything you need.

This was almost helpful, the problem is that I looked up my motherboard on there and it said to go to CMOS and go to SOYO COMBO FEATURE and then go to OnChip IDE Device. So I went to cmos and then soyo combo feature, and looked at it for like 20 minutes, but OnChip IDE Device was nowhere in that list.

I assume that means that for some reason the motherboard is not recognizing the drive. That's probably why its not giving you an option yet.

Could you find anything about the jumpers? Try to set the new drive to master or single by itself and then boot.

Yes the jumpers were on the right thing but I just called a local computer store and they said they would set it up for free so thanks anyways.

you need to setup a partition first, grab a bootdisk for 98, Me 2000, whatever.... when it comes up with the A:\> type,

FDISK X:

X being whatever drive it is you want to partition then say yes you want it to be the largest partion ect... That should work, or at least it did for me. yout drive is SATA or so you said so it wouldnt be in the IDE section of the bios!
*plum*

SATA HDD drives don't need to be set as master or slaves. Your OS should detect the drive automatically. In fact SATA drives are much easier to install than PATA drives.

The thing to look out for is that often motherboards will have an onboard SATA controller but the device driver is not part of the main chipset and you'll need to install it.

Reading the manual it seems you need to install the HIGHPOINT HPT371 driver before SATA will work. Looking through google it seems HIGHPOINT is a hardware RAID driver.

So my advice (if you havn't done this already) is first install the HIGHPOINT driver and then your SATA drive should be automatically detected by WinXP.