O.T computer help!!!!

[Anonymous]

I've just bought a samsung 300gb hard drive and for the life of me cannot set it up on my computer. It is recognised in the bios as a slave drive when i start it up which is what i want but when windows has loaded i cannot access it as it is nowhere to be found!!!!

Is there something i have done wrong??

I set the jumper for slave drive and then connected it up. thats all

hope someone can help
thanks jay

 

[big al]

have you put it on the correct ide cable or is it sata..?

 

[Anonymous]

ummmmmmm.... I have used the second connector on whichever cable is connected to the master drive. Sorry my computer language isn't up to scratch!

 

[Chris]

Jumpers might be a bit dicky. Set it to something else and try it.

Chris

 

[Anonymous]

even though its recognised by the bios?

 

[Chris]

If its plugged in ok, it'll be recognised by the bios. If its not by windows, then I'd swap the jumpers.

Chris

 

[Anonymous]

it says if to be used as a slave drive dont use any jumpers which is how i had it, then it said if to be used as a slave drive but limited to 32gb use a jumper on slot 2 which i have tried and still no joy!

any more ideas?

 

[Roberto]

Try setting the jumpers on both drives to "Cable Select"

Rob
Marea Weekend 1.8 16v 115 ELX

 

[Chris]

Have you connected it to the same ide lead as the primary?

Chris

 

[Anonymous]

yes i have. It is on the same cable and uses the second connector whilst the master drive uses the first connector. Is that correct? I have tried the cable select setting, still no joy

 

[donny lad]

how old is your computer?

old motherboards sometimes dont accept new hardware and especialy hard drives ie.
you can put a 150gb hard dirve in but the computer will think its a 20gb instead.

i have had this problem myself so it could be whats up.

a slave drive is best put in as is, without touching anything but if youre bios picks it up then there is a fault in the registry .

do you use vista or xp?

 

[Anonymous]

um well its difficult to pinpoint the age of my computer as parts are alwaays ebeing upgraded although it's been a while since any upgrading.

The thing is, i used to run two hard drives on it previously but needed more space so i replaced my slave drive with the 300 gig drive.

I am running windows xp.

Would it detect it if i ran it as a master drive? I want to try linux if i have to do that as i dont have the windows cd.

 

[donny lad]

go linux but partition the drive into 3 sections if you download so as to keep ure files safe from unwanted nastys lol, run linux off the smalest then store youre files on the others so if anything goes wrong youre file are safer,

have you ever used linux before?

it is quite complex but is a far superior system, how much ram do you have? linux does run better with 1gb but can run on 512mb

 

[Chris]

Is the hard drive formatted?

Chris

 

[Anonymous]

:S i have no idea. i juat opened the box it came in and plugged it straight in. how do i format it? i didnt realise it would need to be!

 

[ed]

right click on "my computer" select "manage"
choose the "disc management" link on the list, within "storage" this will allow you to properly add your disc.

had this problem a few weeks ago.

 

[Ian]

When you buy a new drive from a shop - It's Zero formatted - Which means that there is no Partition at all - Which means Windows will not recognise the drive until you've created a partition, activated it, and set it to Dynamic or Logic (that's at your discression)

Like the above post, go into there, right click and create a volume - make sure you FULL FORMAT it to write each cluster properly.

 

[Tom]

I had a problem like this when I tried to fit my old hard drive to my new computer. I finally sorted it by going into the bios and telling it what drives and in what order to access them.
Dunno if this is any help.

Tom

 

[Anonymous]

thanks guys. i have tried to format it but the hard drive is not listed there either.

I was going to try and put it in my other computer as a master just to check in case it is a duff drive but i couldn't get my cd drive to burn a copy of linux.