PCTech Forums

Hi all, long time no visit as things have been running smoothly.....Until now. My present set up has 2 IDE hard drives with windows 7 on each (just in case I get problems with one installation) I have just bought a 500GB SATA drive and installed this alongside the previous drives.so far so good...the Bios recognises this as a valid Drive but when I boot up and go to my computer this isn't showing up? Not sure where I am going wrong..tried to put Windows 7 on this (Just to see if this recognises the Drive) but It cant install as it needs formatting first....any Ideas would be more than appreciated....thanks in advance Pete

if its new, it will need a partition created then formatted. Win 7 should do that for you.

If its not cooperating.. is a great little free program that will help.

Thanks liljim...But I cant format this until windows 7 shows this in My Computer? I dont know if I need to alter some settings in the BIOS......but I really only want this hard drive for storage.

Windows wont see it until its partitioned, when i said win 7 should do that i was meaning from the install disk. I should have been more specific. Download that program i linked, it should see the new drive and allow you to create a ntfs partition. Windows should pick it up after that.

Hi again. I'm begining to think that the new SATA drive is not compatable with my 2 IDE drives......Is this Possible?
I have sucsessfully installed Windows 7 on the SATA but ......My computer dosn't show or recognise the old IDE drives when I run this. When I change the BIOS setup to boot from my previous set-up This wont show the SATA drive? All 3 drives are showing in the Bios but I cant seem to get then to recognise each other in Windows....Gonna sell the SATA soon and get a Bigger IDE Drive if I cant get to the bottom of this problem.....Cheers from a seriously P****d Off Pete

WD leading the way, open up a huge storage capacity of 3 terabytes of the single drive.WD sales included in the retail price of one, two or three years or five years of warranty a lot of hard disk drives, but offers its customers the option to purchaselonger (two or three years) a guarantee on its website. Three years is the current industry standards.

Sata hard drive is a most popular hard disk in the present. A SATA hard drive is one option for data storage uses on your personal computer or laptop.