Windows won't recognize my new hard drive

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Jtumble2

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So I bought a new WD caviar blue 500gb from newegg. I know that Sata II is hot swappable.

Anyway, I plug it into the psu and you can hear it spin up and it vibrates a little. Gets hot after a while. So it works.

Can't get it to be recognized in Windows after plugging it in to the mobo. Tried it on my good computer (Vista HP 64) and my old one (XP MCE 32)

Defective drive or am i an idiot.?

Thanks
 
Have you formatted it? New HDD's come in RAW format, which is not recognized by Windows or any other OS. Go into Start > right click "My Computer" (or 'Computer' in Vista) > go to "Manage..." > click on 'Disk management' on the left-side pane > now find your 500GB drive on the right side pane when it loads > right click it and choose to format it/create a new partition. Make sure you do a full format since its a new drive.
 
That's great info, thanks. Too bad it doesnt show up in that list either lawl.

First DOA thing for the computer. Got pretty lucky.. nothing else was DOA.

Thanks
 
Check to see if the BIOS recognizes it or not. If it doesn't, then it could be either a dead drive, bad cable, or faulty motherboard.
 
It isn't a faulty motherboard because I've tried it on two computers. Not a bad cable because I've tried two cables (maybe both are bad) but the drive does power up.

Whatever ill just rma it and buy somethin else
 
It works on other machines, check.

You've tried multiple SATA cables, check.

The motherboard works, you've tried it with other configurations, check.

Definately another one of those awesomely fun PC problems...

My only contribution right now would be to look through the BIOS, and make sure you don't have a secondary SATA controller disabled (in which you have the HDD connected to). It's more than far-feteched, but worth a shot I guess.

Good luck.
 
I'm having a similar problem on a computer I'm fixing. I installed a new drive on my sister's computer because her old one needs to be wiped to get rid of all of the Trojan's she's picked up. The problem isn't the new drive, it installed and installed the operating system fine, but the old drive. It is an IDE drive that was recognized and bootable from before I added the new SATA drive, it is seen by the bios as a slave drive, but it is not seen by Windows XP. She does have a legal copy of Windows so there shouldn't be a problem there. I'm trying to move her 30 GB of music from the old drive to the new drive before I wipe it, so just formatting it is only a last resort option.
 
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