Hard Drive help needed

Hi Doug
Have you changed the "jumper" plug on the back of the hard drives? You may also be getting a conflict with the drive letters, ie both drives being C,D etc.
Change the drive letters while the hard drive is in your old machine and try again.
Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Wayne.

My turn:

"No Comment"

..ditto

"..changed the "jumper" plug on the back of the hard drives?"

(the drive site should have 'settings' for jumper)

Do you plan the dash mount the machine? (Only asking.)

had this problem the other day with an external drive, is it recognised in the boot sequence? if so on the desktop right click on "my computer" and go to "Manage". In there your drive should be listed, from there you can do or delete partitions if you want, format the drive if you want and assign a drive letter.
If it is not that then I don't know......
Nick

Have you checked in the Bios that it has been configured and recognised?

Right-click My Computer and click Manage. Then select Disk Management. If you are lucky the drive will show on the list. You may have to partition unallocated space, format the drive, and assign drive letters.

For full information go to the Support section Western Digital's website and search for Vista.

Doug

I am sure you have probably solved the problem by now, or at lease gone through all the possibilities other Forum members have offered.

If not, what do you see in Disk Management (or whatever it is called in Vista) I think it is probably a conflict in drive letters but these should automatically be resolved at Boot up.

I run various mixtures of HD's and have seen this before. If you can see it in the BIOS as Slave it should be seen in Disk Management.

Please let us know what you find. It would be good info to have.

Doug,

No need to touch the bios, or try to change the drive letter.

Each hard drive has a small jumper which bridges two pins in a row of several. If you are lucky, the drive may show on an attached sticker, what the settings are. If not, you should be able to surf the Web for the particular disk drive manufacturer and obtain the details.

The current hard drive in your PC should be OK as it will be configured as the primary (boot) drive.
The one you wish to install needs to be configured (via jumper) as a Slave drive.

After doing this, power the PC on again and the operating system will (should) recognise the new drive and assign the next available drive letter (usually D) to it. If your Primary drive is partitioned into a "C" and "D" drives, the Slave drive will become "E" and other drives, such as a DVD player/recorder will change from "E" to "F" etc.

It's all done with mirrors Doug. Just a matter of changing those jumpers.

Bill.

Do what they say about assigning a new drive letter to the drive. I have had the exact problem on a friends Dell.
Go to Control Panel /Administrative tools/Computer management and down to disk management and see what that says. If the drive is not shown there you can alter the drive letters THAT ARE THERE to say X Y & Z. That will allow the computer to show your WE. Then assign it to M and put the rest back to the original letters. Change M to the next in sequence and it will be OK
I dont run Vista so am quoting XP on where to find disk management. This is how I got the DELL to show the addon drives and card reader etc. You also have to configure the bios to show SATA drives as ATA NOT RAID
PM me if u need more
Cheers

Errr yeah........:))......is this all code for dirty talk......silverback

Doug
Not to fix your problem but i have just gone through similar and i just bought an external caddy to take the hard drive. Fit your spare hard drive and you can just plug it into any USB port that way you can use it with any comp. Cost me $50 from computer place.

Chris

Just say no to the error and see what it does Sounds like its been set funny from the start

Doug

A few things that may be worth looking at if any of the above does not work

1 - Missing disk is a common problem in Vista for dual install SATA drives - an upgrade to Vista SP1 apparaently addresses this known issue. Is your version Vista or Vista SP1 (SP1 candidate released a few weeks back by MS and can be downloaded from web).

2. In Device Manager do you have any yellow question marks or exclamation marks showing in "other devices" - not beside the actual HDD entry. If so a HDD Sata specific driver update from WD may solve issue or the Raid Array controller for the 2 drives may not be configured properly and needs to be updated. WD may have a small program that will assist in these configuration settings. You can set up SATA drives to be 1 channell 1 and 2 or as a RAID array - there may be a BIOS setting that will be changeable to configure it one way or the other (this may be currently clashing) - experiment with the options

3. In line with 2 above, where the SATA cable from your disk drives goes onto your motherboard may dictate whether you are trying to configure the set up as a RAID array or 1/2 channell set up - many motherboards will have 4 connectors for SATA cables have a look where these go - often a bit of print on MOBO beside connector indicating whether it is for RAID 1 channell 1/2 channell etc - these need to be configured correctly and the same as the BIOS settings.

4 Is your optical drive (CD/DVD) IDE or SATA as if SATA can also cause configuration clash issues giving the results you have explained and is an array/channel issue as described above.

5. Does any of your SATA drives have a setting slide (or sometimes jumper) for transfer speed - might be graduated as 1.5/2.5/3.5 etc especially on newer drives. If one of your drives is an older SATA then it might not have this adjustment (default 1.5 or 2.5) and play around with the setting on the newer one to get them at the same speed especially if they are sitting on the same channell

Hope I have helped a little

Cheers


A

Click on Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management - Storage and then follow through until you get a reading of your logical drives scenario - Then you may need to manipulate the settings of the drive etc etc to get it up as a logical drive.

Hi,

Put your cursor over "Disk 1 Dynamic" and right click on it. Does it give you an option to import the disk? If it does not give you a caution go for it. It has been a while since I have done this but not in Vista.

Some new motherboards also have a Raid controller and this may need to be configured.

Regards,
David.

Hi Doug,
The external drive sounds like an excellent way to solve your data transfer problem.
You don't specify which version of Vista you have, this may be the cause of your problem, because some versions may not support dynamic discs. There was a similar problem with XP.

Cheers,
Wayne.

To all who put in reasonable and proper answers ...Thank you,
Chris came up with the best idea with external adaptor, so that's the way I will go,

Doug

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Doug I have this power supply if you need it, no charge.
Its in a HP Pavillion.Image Could Not Be Found