hard drives

[Steve]

OK, I had an Antec media case (the one without the volume knob and display). I found it quite restrictive in terms of upgrading. I wanted to add a second hard drive, but I had no screws long enough for the silicone grommets. So I have transferred everything into an old case I had laying around. The old case also had a hard drive that I figured would come in handy so I left it in. This is an IDE drive, 80GB (with XP on it).

The OS drive is SATAII 250GB (the original drive with vista on it) in port 1, the new drive is SATAII 500GB in port 2.

The mobo has 4 SATA slots and one IDE. I have no floppy. There is a blu ray drive on SATA port 3.

It picks up all the drives in the BIOS, they all appear normal, apart from the 500GB drive, which has less settings than the other two HDDs.

Windows will not pick up the 500GB drive. It displays the other two fine in my computer.

What could the problem be?

 

[Igorian]

Have you formatted the drive?

Click Start, right click on Computer and click Manage. You should see the unformatted drive under Disk Management.

 

[Steve]

Cheers Igorian, I should have known there was more to it!

Out of interest, I'd like to wipe the 80GB drive clean too, whats the best way of doing this, bearing in mind it had XP installed on it.

One more thing, I keep hearing one of the drives stopping. I assume this is some kind of power saving thing, but how would I stop it doing this? I THINK its the 80GB (IDE) one, because when it stopped, and I tried to explore that drive, it would start up again.

 

[Igorian]

If you want to completely wipe it, just format it. Check the power options in control panel, but this applies to all drives. If one is stalling, either the power cable is loose/faulty or it's on it's way out.

 

[cjard]

Note that having power settings set so that drives spin up and down often may bring about a failure sooner than expected due to bearing failure on the spindle.

If you want to securely erase a drive, download a tool to do so. Formatting, even a full format, does not write much to the drive at all and certainly all your data will be there ready for someone to run a recoveryapp on it