kamyk on 25/8/2010 at 08:40
Sigh, yet again I come to the experts, at a total loss on what to do myself.
I recently got a new hard drive for my bday, and it's my first ever SATA. A nice 2TB from WD. Problem is, my computer refuses to recognize it exists. I plugged it in correctly, it runs, but it doesn't show up in windows setup, device manager, windows explorer, computer management>disk management, or my Easus Partition Manager software. As a matter of fact, when I reboot the very first of those screens that flash by almost too fast to read says "Serial channel 1 no device, serial channel 2 no device". I messed about with my bios setup. No luck. I installed, rebbooted, uninstalled, the SATA drivers for my motherboard about 30 billion (well maybe not quite that many) times.
I looked it up online, and found out I'm supposed to go to VIA technologies looking for an updated driver, only to find that their drivers dowload page does nothing but display one column empty dropdown boxes. I give up.
I'd really love to get to use my 2tb drive, I desperately need it, as my c drive is on its last legs and could fry at any time according to several different disk checkers. Any suggestions or ideas?
Relevant Specs:
Winxp sp3
Soyo dragon plus KT600 motherboard with via technology (no I can't just go get a fancy new MB anytime in the near future).
WD Caviar green 2tb SATA hd.
Any help would be very appreciated, otherwise I'm just gonna try and take it back, and (sigh) trade it in for some half ass 1.5tb ide or something. I'm not happy with that idea as very large ides are known to fail more often, at least as far as I've heard and experienced.
Brian The Dog on 25/8/2010 at 09:06
Go into the BIOS (hold down F1 when the computer starts, before it loads Windows) and see if you can see the hard drive in the BIOS. You may need to turn on the SATA ports in the BIOS. If the BIOS can't see the hard drive, then there's no way Windows will.
Windows setup shouldn't need the SATA drivers loading since you've got Service Pack 3, but it wouldn't hurt to put the SATA drivers on a floppy and hit F6 when the Windows Setup software asks "Hit F6 to load SCSI drivers".
Soyo have gone bankrupt and their website is down, so it may be tricky to get the drivers.
Kolya on 25/8/2010 at 15:45
You can also buy a little SATA-IDE adapter to connect the drive to an IDE port, which is what I ended up doing in the same situation after fiddling endlessly with SATA drivers on floppy and a custom Windows installer disc (slipstream or sth.).
kamyk on 26/8/2010 at 02:55
Tyvm folks. In particular ty Dj Riff for the suggestion and link. That totally did the trick, and I'm up and running :)
