Need Help With New SATA Drive

I have a Dell 8400 that came with a SATA drive. I have bought a second drive and wanted to be able to hot swap or hot boot the drive and was told that the onboard system wouldn't support that. I have the drive in an enclosure and bought a Sata Host PCI card that is supposed to handle hot swapping. Now the problem is Windows doesn't recognize the drive. If I power up the drive and boot the computer the drive doesn't show up in Device Manager. I can go into set up and it shows up in boot sequence but not in Drives. In boot sequense it is 6th. and shows 04:08-0 then the P/N of the drive. What do I need to do to get it working??

 

Hi WilliamP,

you should check that you have the proper drivers for the new SATA drive. I just had a problem like yours a little while back where windows wouldn't detect the drive because of the drivers weren't installed.

I see that you said that you are running off of a SATA drive already but it could be possible that since you are using a PCI SATA hotswappable connection that Windows is not recognizing the drive.

You should probably first make sure that Windows is properly detecting the PCI card.

I hope this helps ya out.

 

Hi Will,

While mostly unexplored territory for me, Viper99's tip on driver's showed up in this page ....

ht*tp://www.quepublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=417709&seqNum=4

Excellent reference here too .... ht*tp://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/IDE.htm Lose the asterisk's.


GF

 

The card shows up in the SCSI and Raid controllers as a SATA Link connector. Also if I have power on the enclosure the drive shows under drive in device manager so it seems the host card is working. I guess.This host card is new to me. Normally I double click on My Computer then right click on the drive and on from there. It doesn't show up there. It will show in device manager but how do I get to it to format and set it up.

 

If the drive is showing up in device manager and not in my computer that should mean that the drive has not been formatted and thus does not have a drive letter.
To solve this you should be able to go to Run and type mmc.

You should have a box show up on the screen. From here select FILE then add snappin. Next select add and then add the Disk Manager snappin.

This snappin should show all hard drives that are connected to the computer. You should see your SATA drive there and should be able to format it and assign a drive letter to it.

I will take some time to see if I can find a site that will show this to you.

VIPER99

 

Here is a microsoft site that explains how to use the mmc and provides some screenshots.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/planning/management/mmcsteps.asp

I hope this helps you out.

VIPER99

 

I have been able to format the drive but it is shown under Layout as Simple and under Type as Dynamic. My C drive is Partition uner Layout and Basic under Type. How can I changer the setup of the new drive to be the same as my C drive?

 

I have managed to get it set up like I wanted. Thanks for the help.