Adding a SATA HD to the computer. Bios thinks it's an external drive. What?

May 19, 2012 9:10 PM

Adding a SATA HD to the computer. Bios thinks it's an external drive. What?

I'm helping a friend install a new bare internal drive (Win7x64). It's the 4th SATA device in the system (including 2 HDs and 1 CD). I plugged it in and the BIOS recognizes it as an IDE master, but the auto detect pegs it as an external drive.

When windows booted, it installed some drivers. Not sure what.

No sign of the drive in windows explorer.

Went to disk management and it sees the drive as not initialized. The drive would not initialize as an MBR or the other option (GPT?).

I'm stuck. I know the rest of the plan is partition and format, but I can't seem to get there.

Suggestions?

posted by elmonobonobo to computers & internet (4 answers total)

The drive would not initialize as an MBR or the other option (GPT?)

Please describe the process you used, the results you expected, and the results you got instead, including the exact text of any error messages.
posted by flabdablet at 1:04 AM on May 20, 2012

How old is the computer, did it come with Vista or 7? What size is the HD? New internal drives of 1TB or larger are "Advanced Format", and machines shipped with Vista and 7 know those, but older BIOSes won't necessarily. Lots of older 1TB drives were not "Advanced Format" and worked with XP, but "Advanced Format" drives won't work with XP (or, in general, most machines that shipped with XP) without updates or drivers.
posted by caclwmr4 at 1:27 AM on May 20, 2012

BIOS recognizes it as an IDE master

Wait, what? SATA does not have a master/slave distinction. But as long as the drive is not the boot drive, it really doesn't matter at all what the BIOS thinks. Once the operating system boots, the BIOS is never used again. Not seeing the drive in Explorer when it hasn't yet been partitioned and formatted is perfectly normal. So the key point in your question is why exactly does editing the partition table in Windows fail? If you don't see any error messages, check the system event logs. I would also suggest booting a Linux distro (you don't have to install anything) and partitioning and formatting the drive from there.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:48 AM on May 20, 2012

Follow up: P5W_DH_Deluxe motherboard looks like it has lots of SATA plugs. However, two of them are "ASUS EZ-Backup" that don't seem to want to be used for regular drives. The Jmicron JMB363 plug (located behind the CPU, lord knows why) happily took the new drive.
posted by elmonobonobo at 10:25 AM on May 29, 2012 [1 favorite]