Hi,

I recently bought a new hard drive because my old one had died However when i hook up the new sata drive it is not recognised by the bios.

The old hard drive was a maxtor 250 GB Sata drive.

The new hard drive is a Hitachi 320GB Sata drive. I have everything backed up from my other hard drive so I just want to do a fresh install of windows xp on the new drive. So i removed the old drive and replaced it with the new one however when the windows set up starts it cannot find the hard disk.


Full Desc. of Drive - HITACHI 32035SATA 320GB 3.5" SATA II INTERNAL HARD DISK DRIVEProduct code: 954219

I have an ASUS mother board K8V-MX.

Things i have tried -
Looking in bios for SATA settings - can't see any well there is one called SATA Boot Rom but not sure what this does? I've tried with it enable and disabled but is still isn't recognised.
Booting with the drive on both SATA ports.
Booting from windows xp disc then pressing f6 and installing latest drivers - still drive not recognised.
Booting with the hitachi tool from their website that allows you to scan for drives and alter SATA settings but this cannot locate the drive either.

Any suggestions for next steps would be appreciated thanks.

What's the drive rating? SATA1 or SATA2 and what's the rating on your motherboard? If the motherboard is rated for SATA1 and the drive is SATA2, you'll have to set the drive to SATA1 for it to work I believe.

The hard drive is a SATA2 but I am not sure about the motherboard - I am pretty sure it is SATA1 but will have to check.

I did read that I may need to change the settings on the hard drive but there are no jumper settings on the Hitachi drive and i read that to change the settings i needed to use the hitachi boot tool see below. I used this but it doesn't recognise the drive either so i can't change the settings!!

Support - Downloads and Utilities

Then either you have a malfunctioning SATA controller or the drive is faulty, most likely that the drive is faulty.

i agree. I would RMA it to hitachi, and try the new one.

Thanks for all your replies and taking time to help me. i had another go at fixing this with no luck. I ended up exchanging the drive for a seagate (unfortunatley no atx power so I had to buy an adapter too), Its now up and running and i am reinstall windows as we speak.