New HDD not detected

F

funkin182

New member
Hi guys i instialled a new hard drive today. Its a 1tb samsung drive, exact same model as the one currently in there. It is connected properly and spins up when i turn the computer on and i can see it in my cmos bios setup under channel 3 master (CH1 is my main drive, CH2 is my dvd/cd). When windows boots up its not in my computer. I cant even see it in device manager or disk management so i cant format it or anything!! Please helppppp
 
i just tried unplugging my main hdd (with windows on it) and restarted the computer. with the w7 install cd in it detected the new hard drive but i could not format it without installing windows on it so i cancelled the installation. this at least confirms the hdd is not faulty, i have no idea how to fix this
 
I think you need to format the HDD on another PC first...Ive had this happen once before and took it back to the shop and got one of their tech guys to format it on one of their PCs..

it hasnt happened on other drives Ive had but it did on that one, a hitachi...
 
funkin182 said:
what if i put it in my old hdd enclosure could i format it as an external drive then put it back in the pc??
Click to expand...

Yes you can.

How old is this PC you are putting it in? Some old motherboards with early SATA connectors only support the older 1.5 SATA transfer rate. For those boards, you need to set a jumper on the hard drive. Otherwise wacky stuff like what you describe can happen.

On the other hand, if you have another drive just like it working perfectly without throwing the jumper, that is an unlikely cause.
 
its a completely new machine as of about 3 months ago so the motherboard is fine. im gonna give the external enclosure a go
 
I recently had a similar issue, but I didn't need to format it in a separate machine or use an enclosure; I just popped in my Windows* install disc, and wrote a partition that fills the entire HDD. After rebooting into Windows, I just formatted the drive and and it was ready to rock.

*Or the OS of your choice, whatever that may be.
 
You don't need to install it in another computer to create a partition and format it, or install Windows then wipe it.

You should be able to go to "Disk Management" under Administrative Tools in Windows and format from there. Even if it doesn't show up in Explorer it will show up there.
How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP
Create and Format a Partition in Windows Vista

Otherwise:

Download a Gparted Live CD image and burn it to a CD. Then, boot to the CD. Depending on your bios settings you may have to change your boot order to put your CD drive first in line.

Gparted is a linux based live CD which runs a full featured partition editor. Pretty simple to use, free and open source.
 
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