Solution: OS cant find ur Sata HDD???

[Riqand]

I had this problem after building my computer. I had two sata drives one seagate 320 GB and a Western Digital 1TB......after i connected everything good an proper and loaded my OS, i found only one hard drive . The SG (seagate) was recognized by windows and showed up in the "Computer" screen but not the WD (western digital).
I rebooted into bios to see if maybe it wasnt recognized, lo and behold there is was, clearly recognized by bios. after jimmying things around in windows and bios trying to "fix" it, i discovered the drive wasnt initialized. How I found this out is, i went into device manager and the drive was recognized there as well. i right clicked the drive, went to the properties selection and then to the volumes tab. there should be a button that says Populate, after clicking this button it said the drive was not initialized ......Now on how to fix this.
Exit the device manager and open up the control panel and go to administration tools. Click Computer management, and go to disk management in the left pane. Richt click the HDD that is not initialized and there should be an option to initialize after that EDIT: u may have to allocate the drive which is done by right clicking the drive again and selecting, make simple volume, follow the instructions. after allocating, then u can format the drive or if the drive is already allocated and u dont wont to format then it should show up in the windows "computer" screen. This was all dont in Vista so in Xp it may be differant. Hope this helps

[Rich'[ard]]

welcome to Forums!
thanks for that. did this happen during your Windows installation?
i've never had such a problem. sounds a bit confusing :p

are you saying you coudlnt' access the harddrive? because when i have a new drive (that's not my OS drive) it detects it but can't use it. it just tells you to format it in Vista.

[tuskenraider]

Thanks for the info. People post all the time encountering your problem and your solution is usually the problem solver. And it's the same with XP as well.

[DarkFury]

im having that issue on my Gateway laptop ... flame away i have my suit on ( and its my brothers laptop lol) well back to the story , my niece his daughter, spilled water and shorted out the connector ... =]

could that be your problem ?

if not ... you might need to download and install Sata drivers , get a new cable, and then retry your install

[Riqand]

I found the soulution and i was posting it here for ppl who may run across the problem in the future. from what i read it seems like a common problem

[Riqand]

;5983736"]welcome to Forums!
thanks for that. did this happen during your Windows installation?
i've never had such a problem. sounds a bit confusing :p

are you saying you coudlnt' access the harddrive? because when i have a new drive (that's not my OS drive) it detects it but can't use it. it just tells you to format it in Vista.

no what happend when i opened My computer screen the drive was not registering all i had was one drive .....from what is sounds like all u need to do is format ur drive to get it to work......i recomend NTSC format