Unable to detect harddrive!

Hi, i recently bought a new harddrive, however i made a mistake not realising that it was my 3rd IDE harddrive.

Upon trying to install the harddrive i realised their was a problem since there were no IDE jumpers left in my computer. I have however managed to get a SATA adaptor which plugs into the back of one of my IDE harddrives and allows it to run through the SATA port on my motherboard.

The problem is that my computer can't seem to find the harddrive ive installed on the SATA port.

my 3 harddrives are a:
18gb maxtor
80gb western digital
200gb maxtor (new)

I started by placing the 200gb on the adaptor but when that didnt work ive changed so my 18gb is on it. The computer doesnt seem to find either. All 3 harddrives work via IDE and the one on the SATA adaptor spins when powered up.

Looking around on the forum there seems to be 2 similar problems but i havnt managed to work out what to do there seems to be talk of drivers for the SATA harddrives but obviously since mine is originally IDE i dont have any im at a loss as to what else to try any help would be greatly appreciated. My current system is running XP off of the 80gb harddrive which is partitioned in half. the 80gb drive currently the IDE master with the 200 as slave. I was hoping to be able to move everything from the 18gb across to the 200gb format it and then run windows off just the 18gb in an effort to keep windows running efficiently

Thanks in advance!

 

Sounds like you need the SATA drivers that go with the motherboard. I recommend going to the manufacturer's website to get those, just get the model number of the mother board and do a search for it at the manufacturer's site. Do you have more than one optical drive(cd-rom etc.)? A lot of motherboards only support 4 IDE or SATA devices unless you have a RAID set up.

 

Yes ive got 2 optical devices installed. Does this mean my SATA won't work?
Ive been on the maxtors website but they only seem to have raid controllers. The harddrive isnt detected on those either though! On one of the other SATA harddrive posts id noticed something about installing SATA drives before IDE so ive tried detecting it with both IDE harddrives unconected and still doesnt find it!

 

What motherboard do you have? in the mean time try swapping one of the opticals out with the extra hd(be sure to set jumpers right) and see if all 3 hd's show up, this just checks to make sure you aren't having some kind of conflicts. Also go to the motherboard manufacturer's site and see if they have documentation on what type and how many drive's it will support at one time.

 

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 - P4 titan series.
Ill so try swapping out an optical for the harddrive now though i cant see it being a conflict error as 2 of the drives are maxtor and both work with the western digital one sepratly. Ive got the manual for the motherboard but all it says is 4 IDE devices and 2 SATA devices which is just the ports on the board.

 

Ok, I read through the manual for your motherboard, and it appears, that in order to add a SATA device, when you already have 4 IDE's you're going to have to set up RAID. Read through the manual for setting up your RAID, and see if it's feasable for you. A word of caution, read through all the steps in it and if you have any questions, come back here and ask before you do anything! There are people here that have a good knowledge of RAID systems and will be willing to help you. Also watch this post in the event that I am not 100% correct in this.

 

Ok now im really confused Ive been reading through the manuals (there seems to be 4 different versions of the thing) Ive found stuff about setting up a SATA raidd stuff about IDE raid but nothing about what to do with noth :S i found 1 thing that looks about right about installing non-raid SATA conrollers to the harddrive before it can be recognised and that the controlers needed are on my motherboard drivers CD but the file is not there! which has confused me even more . Not sure what to do next can't seem to find any hopeful leads.

 

Here, try this it is from Gigabyte, and will look for the drivers you need, hook the extra drive up to the SATA first, because if you board can run the extra SATA's with the IDE's then this may correct any issues.

http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Support/DownloadCenter/DownloadCenter_1.htm

 

K im installing them now. Over 100meg of drivers but i dont think any of them are for the hd.

theres a:
INF Update Utility - something to do with updating usb drivers etc.?

RealTek ACp7 codec driver

Interl 825XX series LAN driver

so i dont think any of them are going to make a difference

btw thanks for the help and i love ur avatar m8 ^^

 

The drivers are now installed! No luck however still can't detect the harddrive

 

Do it the easy way and buy an IDE PCI card and install the 3rd drive to that.


If you don't want to (they are cheap and much better than convertors and adaptors), then look in the Bios and make sure your settings are correct.

 

Ive got my bios set up with the SATA on auto and the SATA RAID disabled since ive only got one drive via SATA. I looked into the PCI cards but they were like £26 . I got my converter free off my brother who had one spare so . Those BIOS settings are what it says in my manual they right? The drivers that the manual say are on my motherboard driver cd arent there though and im not sure if that's the problem?

 

You can get them cheaper than that, at least here anyway.

I suggested the PCI card because it's foolproof, will give you another port left over, and takes the burden from the motherboard.

 

Ok thx. Im gonna try and get this adaptor working first however . I only want the 18gb harddrive to install windows on and keep it clean otherwise! That way hopefully nothing can go wrong with my windows installation unlike what usually happens to me .