Just bought new seagate sata drive, but cant figure out how to get it detected..it's all hooked up properly.

Anyone have any ideas?

It's should auto detect if sata is enabled in bios..
load bios defaults and try again?
rooted hard disk?

use disk management to mark as active

does windows know about your sata controller

Yeah you have to download the software to install it

Do you have any other SATA drives connected or is this the only one?

If it is the only SATA drive in the machine, check that you have enabled SATA in the BIOS and it should pick it up from there.

Go to the seagate website to get the software to install it, had to do the same for my 200gb

sata is enabled in bios, it's onboard sata controller.


here's real newb question..where's disk management located

right click my computer -> Manage

Storage -> Disk Management

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

ok maka

Yeah because i had the same thing happen when i first got mine, wasn't being detected at all, installed it with the software and it showed up right after.

Although if that doesn't do it for you i dunno what else to do.

not having jumper block wouldnt matter aswell?

there's no jumper settings for SATA drives as far as I know.

I didn't have to use any software to set up my seagate SATA drive. in the BIOS I just set the sata thing to on and it's mode to IDE (it had IDE/RAID mode) or something like that. Went back into windows and there it was, unformatted 200gig of empty space.

got it working thanks to seagate wizard thing.

fuskin tools cost me 28gb of space aswell..rude as.


cheers for help people.

Mine didn't detect when I put it in either, partition magic did and that's all that mattered, since I was going to format and partition it anyways.

which mainboard is it?

some mainboards may have issues detecting SATAII hdd's.

there's a jumper on the back of the drive still which you use to knock it back to SATA 1,

find out which setting it is (if it doesn't say it on the drive, google it, or check seagate's website) and see if that helps.

also check that your mainboard's sata chipset isn't set to RAID mode, as you may need to add it in the raid BIOS if it is.

got it working thanks to seagate wizard thing.

fuskin tools cost me 28gb of space aswell..rude as.


cheers for help people.

What Size hard disk is it? if you're running stock windows xp without service pack 1 installed you won't be able to have the drive over 120gb i think it is.

m'board - Asus P4C800
hdd - seagate 400gb(ST3400633AS)

Im stalling legit copy of xp..so that's cool bout sp1..it's made itself 372gb after being formatted.

400 billion bytes ~= 372.53 gigabytes

that's how they get ya

thats one of the oldest marketing with numbers trick in the book

You guys do realise a brand spanking new HDD with no partition on it will not get picked up by windows (in my computer)... right?

It must be initialised and formatted then it will just show up in my computer. Someone on the other page has already said how to do so.


I spose its about time the manufacturers have made a tool to do this automagically for all the nubs out there :)

uh, mine shows up in my computer as nothing, when I click on it it asks me if I want to format it. is my computer just special?

hell I can disable a drive in the bios and it sitll shows up in windows

Its probably already been paritioned in the past and had the partition nuked by the last user so you can't see the data anymore.

Its a common question I hear a lot working as a tech... I just bought this new drive and put it in myself and it doesn't show up in Windows... is it broken?

9/10 it has not been initialised and formatted, the other 1/10 they have it jumpered incorrectly when using 2 parallel drives on a single cable.