Help with a SATA drive issue

[yacht_boy]

OK, so I've spent many nights this week and most of today banging my head against a wall trying to format a new 1 GB Seagate (specs below) SATA drive that I wanted to put into my new system.

The system (specs in my signature) is relatively new to me. I got it about a month ago to upgrade to HD with a new HD-PVR. When I went to install the new HD, which I purchased separately instead of having Magic Micro install it for me (to save $40, d'oh!), I found that the mobo only had 1 SATA power connection instead of the 2 advertised, and that one was being used for the DVD burner. So I ordered some molex power converter cables from Taiwan or somewhere for a couple of bucks and had to wait for them to arrive.

While I was waiting, I took the two IDE hard drives out of my old machine and slapped them in this one. Surprisingly enough, everything just worked after some driver updates--Windows XP SP2 booted right up, Sage fired up, I had no issues at all. My OS and music collection was on a 160 gb IDE drive and I had a separate 300 GB IDE drive as a slave that I dedicated to Sage. I went through all the headaches of getting the HD PVR to work (it's currently on RMA to Hauppauge, hopefully the new one will actually function) but eventually got everything pretty much worked out, I just wanted more storage.

The new power cables finally showed up and I had to send back the HD-PVR anyway, so I figured this would be a good time to finish the setup. I took the 300 GB HD out and installed the new 1 TB drive, put a windows XP SP2 64-bit slipstreamed install disc I had ready into the DVD player, and got the error message that the drive wasn't formatted properly.

I went into the disc management and couldn't see the drive. Google told me that I'd have to format the drive from outside windows using a special linux distro called PartedMagic that runs from a bootable CD, so I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a CD.

Here's where things get weird. I couldn't get the CD to boot. Tried resetting things in the BIOS but with no luck. I took out the OS Hard Drive so that it would stop going straight to windows and had no luck again. Tried the disc in my laptop and it works like a champ. Kept trying, learned some new things about the BIOS, and eventually got it to occasionally recognize the disc and sometimes even fully load the linux distro, but then the resolution was all screwed up and I couldn't navigate the distro. When I'd try to reboot, I would then be back to not getting the CD to load at all.

Thinking it might be the SATA DVD drive, I swapped it out for my old IDE DVD drive and that cleared things up for a little while--I was temporarily able to get into the linux distro, but I still had the resolution issue that made it so that I couldn't navigate to the right command to actually format the HD. Then that stopped working, too.

I put the old computer (which does not have a SATA connector for me to check the status of the SATA drives) back together and verified that the IDE DVD drive, cables, etc., were all good. I took things back apart and put the new machine back together with just the OS IDE drive. Booted to windows no problem. Added the IDE DVD drive (as a slave on the same cable), played with the jumpers, can't get the drive to boot the bootable CD.

So here's where I am--this machine doesn't have a floppy drive and I can't seem to make either DVD drive work for some reason when I want to load a bootable CD or DVD. At the very least, I need to be able to format the new SATA drive so that I can continue to use my old 32-bit XP OS and have Sage record to the new larger HD. Ideally, I'll get that formatted and then be able to figure out a way to install the 64-bit version of windows onto one of the three hard drives, maybe using the old computer.

Can anyone help? I need to format the SATA drive with no floppy and no bootable CD/DVD player. And I also need to diagnose what the %*! is wrong with the system that I can't get these devices to boot consistently.

I've checked and rechecked every cable from main power cord to the tiniest wire using known goods wherever possible and checked and rechecked the various connectors for proper seating and connections. I've been very careful to stay grounded but of course it's possible I passed a static charge on to something, although unlikely.

Thanks in advance-

Jason

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Hard Drive - 1TB, 3.5", SATA, 3Gb/s, NCQ, 32MB Cache - Internal Hard Drive

[jerryt]

I just formated two of these drives yesterday.

Connect them to a working operating system.

Open "Disk Management" initialize the disk and then format.

Or you maybe be able to do this with Acronis Disk Director boot disk as a backup method.

[yacht_boy]

The drive is connected to a working install of XP SP2, but XP cannot see the drive in Disk Management. I tried using Partition Magic, but that also cannot see the drive. It looks like this is fairly common from my google searches. The BIOS does see the drive, I just can't get everything to play well together. If I can find a copy of Disk Director I'll give that a shot.

[yacht_boy]

SOLVED! I found the answer in this post: http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windo...n-Windows.html

Turns out that deep within the BIOS, there is a switch for SATA drives to go from AHCI to RAID to IDE. I set the drive up as an IDE drive and now it shows up in Windows XP and I can manipulate it. It was preset to AHCI, which apparently does not work with XP.

I haven't tried to play with the DVD drives yet, but hopefully this will also solve those issues.

[Polypro]

AHCI will work with XP, but you need to F6 during install to install a driver...you had your BIOS set to AHCI on install. Vista supports AHCI natively. No matter, IDE is fine, that's what I use. Glad you fixed it.

P

[yacht_boy]

The problem was that I don't have a floppy drive in that computer (or any computer) and I couldn't get the two DVD players to work consistently as bootable drives for some strange reason. This meant that I couldn't load a Windows boot disc to get to the F6 prompt, and even if I could have I wouldn't have been able to load the driver disc. But this fix seems to have worked, I'm transferring files onto the new drive right now.