laurakoz

I have a 5YO HP Pavillion 520n. 1.3GHz (Intel Celeron), 256MB RAM, running on Windows XP. Recently revamped the whole thing due to a virus with complete formatting, etc. Purchased a new HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.8, 250GB) to use as the master and am using an older Western Digital Caviar (WD600AB) with 60GB as the slave. Couldn't get the slave to register in BIOS but finally saw it after purchasing new cables and setting the pins to 'Cable Select'.

Everything shows up in the boot up where it should and as it should (e.g. primary master, primary slave) as well as under the main tab in BIOS. In the Boot tab in BIOS, there is only 1 IDE listed, but I was told this was usually for the cables I had and in using the Seagate as the master. However, the slave drive is not recognized on the Desktop in 'My Computer'.

I was told this was likely a driver issue (i.e. anytime you can see it in BIOS but not on the Desktop) but after visiting Western Digital's site, it seems they don't really offer many driver downloads (in fact, I don't think they even have my HDD listed anymore) and instead, point you to the manufacturer of your motherboard or card controller.

Anyone have any ideas? :)

linderman

hello Laura:


you dont need drivers for hard drives. You do however need to format the drive before it will be visible in My computer as ready for use.


you basically have two options:


A) you can format the drive from within windows dismanagement. There is a disk managment guide in my sinature links.

B) You can use the hard drive manufacturers set-up utility to partition and format your drive.

I prefer choice B; but both will work

laurakoz

Thanks Joe... I'm checking out that link now. I'll be back ;)

laurakoz

I bow down to your knowledge so I'd prefer to use WD's Data Lifeguard but I'm not sure which one to pick. The model # on my drive is WD600AB(-22CDB0) and it's a Caviar, quite old. I'm assuming it's the 5400RPM versus the newer one but they don't seem to have that listed (I've sent them an e-mail). When I type in my model number it pulls up a Protege. Any thoughts?

linderman

yup your right its the Protege


you can download the Data Lifegaurd Tools for Windows 11.2

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n


its rather strait forward, keep us posted on your progress

laurakoz

Isn't it always the simpler solution once you've already tried the most difficult ones..? While I was waiting for your response, I played around in the Disk Management and just create a new partition since nothing was allocated and then changed around all of the drive letters. We now have two working hard drives. Thank you so much for the help and the quick responses. I'm sure I'll be back at some point in time ;)

linderman

happy to help and glad to see you are on the way!


enjoy