Reader Rick Goodier wrote me about the problems he was having adding a SATA hard drive to his new computer.
Hi, Terry. I am a new subscriber just signed on.Perhaps I will have some suggestions for you as time goes on. I have been playing around with computers for more than a few years.
But today I have a question. I am working to max storage on a new comp I have built. 3 GHz processor, I GB memory, medium video card. I want to have at least two (three better) optical drives, so my ide slots were mostly used up. I put in an extra ide controller card I picked up years ago with an early large capacity hard drive I bought. So I am currently running three drives, one as primary, and two as storage on the extra ide card. Yet I would like to have that PCI slot free for another function, a video recording card.
So, because a 300GB SATA drive turned up at a great price, I got one, realizing that I had two SATA controller connections free on the mobo. I hooked up the drive and booted up, thinking I would see the drive as an unformatted drive in the drive manager function of “manage” under “my computer”. Not there. Bios seems to recognize it, because a new request comes up during boot up, asking if I want to set up a raid array. I tried Acronis Partition Manager, and even dusted off Partition Magic. But no joy while in Windows.
So, here’s my question, do I need to fdisk the drive first, before windows will recognize it? Or is there some magic software that will recognize it, even though windows doesn’t…
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