Installing 400gb wd harddrive

[g2k556]

For christmas, I got a 400 gb hdd. So i plugged it in and turned my computer back on, but it doesn't recognize it's there. Any suggestions? thanks in advance. Gavin

 

[taintedplay]

did you plug it in a yellow or purple sata port? i had to switch mine around a few times to get it to find it, try it in the other color or another port.

 

[g2k556]

did you plug it in a yellow or purple sata port? i had to switch mine around a few times to get it to find it, try it in the other color or another port.

i have both my 160 and 400 plugged into the purple, i could try putting them into yellow.

 

[SirMille]

SATA drives require drivers for Windows to recognise them.

 

[Blitersety]

no they don't lol. mine worked just fine, the computer recognized it and I installed windows on it before any drivers were installed when I first built this rig...

 

[Prophet]

are you on vista or xp?

 

[g2k556]

xp, when i start up after it's plugged in, a little balloon notifications says there is a new hardware and what not and says the hdd is working properly, but when I go to my computer it only shows the c: drive, the 160gb one.

 

[SirMille]

no they don't lol. mine worked just fine, the computer recognized it and I installed windows on it before any drivers were installed when I first built this rig...

When XP Pro first saw a SATA drive it did not recognise it, only with patches to the original release to production did the OS natively recognise SATA drives.

 

[carnageX]

I KNOW SP2 supports SATA natively...not sure about SP1 and before... Anyway...you'll have to format the drive. To do this, do the following:

Start > Right click "My Computer" > Manage > Find 'Disk Management' on the left side > Find the new 400GB drive in the bottom half of the screen (it should say something about unallocated space) > right click > format (or create partition, I forget which). Pick Full Format as NTFS. Wait for it to finish, and you should have a newly formatted drive =).

Steps above are the same as in Vista, I believe as well. Only difference is that instead of "My Computer" its just called "Computer."

 

[dark strike1]

I think the problem is format. Did you format the drive yet? You need to do that in order for it to work.