I just installed a 250GB SATA II hard drive as a second hard drive in my computer (running Windows XP Service Pack II). My original hard drive is also SATA II, but 160 GB.
BIOS shows it exists. Also, the Windows Device Manager recognizes it, and even says “This device is working properly.” But no drive letter for it appears, so I can’t access it.
How can I gain access to my new drive? Can any of you gurus help? Thanks!!
Right click on my computer, click manage, click disk manager, right click drive and choose format. After formatting, it should work.
If that doesn’t solve it, swing on over to this thread: [forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … highlight=](External Hard Drive installation question
It’s about an external drive, but after a few posts the info’s valid for internal drives too.
You may have to use the software from your drive manufacturer to ‘ready’ the disk for use, check out their website.
OK, thanks! I’ve assigned a drive letter and am formatting now. Silly me for thinking XP would handle all this automatically!
Did you correctly set the jumpers on the back of the drive? Having those wrong can make funny things happen sometimes.
silly us, for thinking Microsuck’s head and rectum are separate body parts
Isn’t that unnecessary with SATA II?
I’ll let you know what happens once its formatted and ready (slow process, and I’ll have to let it run as I go to work).
Are there any advantages to the SATA hard drives over the regular ones?
Just curious…
[quote=“Mer”]Are there any advantages to the SATA hard drives over the regular ones?
Just curious…[/quote]
Claims to be speed again as prior added value, but I could not spot the difference.
When bundeling 2 SATA drives together, someone told me that one would read the binaries as ‘I’ and the other the “0” increasing stability.
Isn’t that unnecessary with SATA II?
I’ll let you know what happens once its formatted and ready (slow process, and I’ll have to let it run as I go to work).[/quote]
Could be! I’m from the old school… I missed that part of your post. 
I’ll bow out of this one. Though the rest of the site said it should be easy. Mentioned something about a diskwizard.
Isn’t that unnecessary with SATA II?[/quote]
SATA devices no longer have the master/slave/cable-select jumpers (and on Western Digital the two separate master settings depending on whether there’s a slave present… wtf?). Each SATA connector is a separate single-drive bus, or effectively every device is a master.
However, the SATA-II drives I’ve bought still have a jumper to select the device speed. Since some SATA-I controllers spaz out on a full-speed SATA-II device the drives have a jumper to limit the device to SATA-I speeds. [color=red]Some SATA-II drives are set by default to use the SATA-I speed, so it’s worth checking the settings if you have a SATA-II controller.[/color]
Format also has a ‘quick format’ option that takes less than a minute. Without this the format utility checks every single block on the drive, which can take two hours or more even on a fast drive.
Jlick’s Technical English expression for the day: “spaz out”. 
It’s working! Thanks, gurus! 