OS Doesn't See HD

[Jewelzz]

A friend was having PC issues and decided to format but now the OS, XP, doesn't see the HD. He has 2 300G Seagate ATA HDs, neither of which are beeing seen. When trying to load XP it says he only has 2G available. What would cause this and how does he fix it?

 

[Sazar]

Are the hdd's s-ata or p-ata?

If s-ata, he might have to load some drivers at startup when installing his o/s to recognise the hdd's.

 

[Jewelzz]

Their SATA. It asks if he wants to load/install drivers, he checks yes then it f**ks up.

 

[kcnychief]

Could be a few things -

XP I believe pre-sp1 only saw drives that were less than 137GB. Not the issue here, but make sure he's got a SP2 based disc.

Ensure he has the correct drivers. Depending on the manufacturer, even similar drivers can bork it.

What's the model of the motherboard?

 

[ShepsCrook]

You might want to also check his partition settings. He could just have no primary partition set, or his MBR is messed up. You could try the programs that the HD company makes. Like Seatools or Lifeguard...

 

[Aprox]

All good points, I however think thats its drivers as kcnychief mentioned. Be absolutely sure you have the correct drivers on a floppy disk.

Also, I Just thought of this. I was an early adopter of S-ATA back about 4 years ago or so, maybe a tad more. I remember having to actually create a RAID0+1 array with a single HD (odd I know) for it even to show up, and I still had to use the drivers when installing windows. The SATA bus I guess went through the raid controller or something. It was odd, and took me a whole day to figure out. Not sure on how old his hardware is though, so hopefully its not that complicated.

 

[Jewelzz]

Thanks guys. I'll have to ask him today at work.

 

[Mainframeguy]

... I remember having to actually create a RAID0+1 array with a single HD (odd I know) for it even to show up, and I still had to use the drivers when installing windows....

this is fairly possible even with more recent boards - was the case with my MSI Neo 2 also....

 

[ShepsCrook]

Oh I completely agree that the drivers are a possibility, but since it was already covered in a previous post, I figured I'd give some other possibilities.