This week I have been in an ugrade from hell. One of the biggest problems I had was my compter waould not recognize new SATA drive ( Seagate SATA drive). The SATA drive was not recognized in my BIOS or during Windows XP setup.
At the start things were going well …
This was quite a challenge- made more difficlt becasue the flash-based download center was not working properly on Asus site in firefox.. This took me about an hour to figure out. The whole day was a series of head banging from start to finish.
Pins to attach new SATA drive broken on motherboard so I had to go out and buy enclosure for drive and turn it into external drive, which was it own set of problem. Discovered reason for my failing drive- most likey the compacted dust in case because I forgot to but side of case back on several month ago.. back out to store to by compressed air and clean.
So, all set to go with my Windows Xp SP3 disc in hand. I have installed new o/s about a million times and this should have been a piece of cake. ( cough cough).
Took out old SATA drive ( I will later put this in enclosure so i can pull data from it before it crashes) and pop in my new one. A Seagate 500 gig SATA drive. So far so good. I got a great deal on Seagate Hard 500 Gig drive and paid 79.99 for it. I am almost giddy with the thougt of more space. it is mind boggling to me that my first computer had a 500 meg hard drive and that was considered HUGE at the time.
I boot from Windows XP cd to do a fresh install, thing moving along well and no sign of trouble. I do have another drive in there - an IDE one. I go through install and the new Seagate SATA not recognized or showing up as an option to do frech Windowd XP install. I first I think it might be the SATA ( RAID) drivers but think to myself .. Mmmm had a SATA drive in there all ready so probably not the issue ( WRONG!). I should have stopped there and followed my instincts. The drivers were needed for NEW install.
I waste TONS time putting back in old drive, format new drive, starting into BIOS screen blankly. I also partitioned the drive into smaller chunks thinking the drive might be too big ( this cold have been a factor , I don’t know) Then think it has to be the drivers.( It was).
Finding and Installing RAID/SATA Controller Drivers for New Hard Drive and O/S
The bottom line it was the controllers for the drive that I needed, This you have to get from motherboard cd. Most people wil not get a motherboard cd with a new computer. You need to find out the brand and model of your motherboard, you can do this at boot up by pressing pause/break key or open up your case and look on the motherboard, the name and model will be there somewhere. Look for names like Asus, Biostar or Intel will be a logo and then model number underneath.
Go to manufactured site and wade through the mire to find RAID drivers for your operating system. They are called Raid drivers but this is what you want for your SATA drive.
It may be a tiresome trek to find the drivers. I don’t know why they hide them. Try not to get frustrated.
The motherboard manufacturer site somewhere have a download called ‘raid/sata/controllers/drivers or similar. Download and extract these files. Somewhere in those files will be a disksetup.exe or similar. This will create format and install drivers that you need on a floppy disc. Yes a FLOPPY disc.
Dig out a floppy disk from somewhere. Create the floppy by running the setupdisk.exe file that you just downloaded. save the floppy for later during windows setup.
This is not as hard as you may think. One thing to note- this will be next to impossible if you do not have access to another computer. Get everything done before you pull out drive and don’t have access to internet or you PC.
So, now go back to windows install and during setup it will ask you if you have any 3rd part RAID or SCSI drivers to install ( you do!) hit F6 on keyboard (it will tell you to do this in Windows setup) . Pop in your floppy and I think it says hi “S”. then follow instructions to the end you set up should go smoothly and when you get to place in setup where it asks you where you want to install your new operating system your new drive SHOULD be there.
It is also possible that you may have to do something in your BIOS of motherboard to have it detect SATA automatically.
Some other things to note” In BIOS you may have to play around with boot sequence. Mine kept changing and at one point was trying to boot from HDD and hung. I went into BIOS and changed to order cd drive, floppy, HDD. It did get messed up a few times so check this if having issues.
All in all this was the worst install I have ever tackled in 14 years.
Stay tuned for more fixes and tips on recovering from a new hard drive install.
If you are having issues leave a post comment here and I will try and help.
Tags: Computer and Hardware by Lisa Stewart
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