My HDD has pretty much died so I bought a new one.

My motherboard supports SATA so I bought a SATA HDD.

I thought it would just be a case of plugging in the new drive and then doing a clean install of XP but it's not working like that.

When XP set up gets to the part where the drive is selected the XP set up doesn't see the new drive.

I have installed the SATA stuff from the motherboard set up disk and I have fdisk'd and formatted the new drive with NTFS but XP still wont see it.

I re-connected my old drive and when I go to My Computer the new drive is there and I can move files in and out of it.

However, the XP set up wont see it at all.

A couple of things that I did notice were:

1. In the BIOS set up the selection for SATA/RAID/SCSI is grayed out and

2. In the properties of the drive it is described as a SCSI drive.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Davva strange, so the OS is reading the drive as SCSI, but BIOS isn't reading it at all?

I'll bump this for a real expert.

when you install the xp, did you connect the old HDD?
have you make the new HDD as a master?
did the bios see the HDD.my first INSTINCT was to check the jumpers. Is the old drive still connected??

are both drives currently connected?
Thanks for the replies.

Initially I had the old HDD connected but when I couldn't see the new one I tried disconnecting the old one so only the new HDD was connected.

SATA drives don't have master/slave jumpers.

I have connected the the old one back up and gone into Disk management. The new drive is showing there as a NTFS drive on D: and is healthy and active. The properties still list it as a SCSI.

When I disconnect the old drive and start to load XP there are still no disks listed when it gets to the bit where you select the drive.

I looked in the BIOS and the new drive is not listed in the IDE drives but I'm not SURE that it should be. Will it still be listed even though it's a SATA drive?

During boot, the IDE search shows only my DVD player as secondary master. Then it checks the RAID and the new drive shows there.

I'm confused.

have you tried a different SATA cable?
Quote from: Flip81 on September 13, 2007, 04:05:27 PM

have you tried a different SATA cable?

Very early on in the XP setup process you will see a prompt at the bottom of the screnn that states if you are installing RAID or SATA drives press F6 now...at that point insert your SATA driver disk.