GoodJudge

Hi,

I have just added a 2nd, new internal hard drive to an HP Pavilion a640.uk desktop, running XP Home SP2. I have two problems:

1) When I first booted up, Windows showed the 'new hardware installed' message, and Device Manager says it is installed OK, but it's not listed in My Computer.

2) When I boot up, I no longer get the initial system information screens. The monitor is blank for 20-30 seconds, until it gets to the Windows logo part of the boot process.

I believe the jumpers are set correctly:
- original HDD (Samsung SP0802N) changed from 'cable connect' to 'master'
- new HDD (Maxtor STM3160215A) set to 'slave', i.e. no jumper installed

Could it be the ribbon cable? The 2nd drive is attached to the same cable as goes to the CD drive, because that has a spare connection. The ribbon cable to the original HDD has no spare connector, is colour coded on the motherboard and is labelled 'master'. Do the hard drives need to be on the same cable? (In my research before posting this question, I haven't found anywhere that explicitly says this). If so, do I need to get a special ribbon cable to match this 'master' one?

eneles

Hi

Is the new drive detected in BIOS?

Double check the jumper settings.
Maxtor/slave = no jumper.
The Samsung/master should look like this:

You need to format new drives in Disk management.

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP.

If that doesn't help - try another 80-wire ribbon cable.

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GoodJudge

Thanks - have just got round to finishing all the checks and all is sorted now. All the hardware was fine, it was just that I hadn't done anything in Disk Management. All the other guides I checked didn't mention this - they just covered the jumpers and cabling, and as Windows recognised the new drive when I first booted, I couldn't work out why it wasn't plug + play.

Thanks again.

eneles

I'm glad you got it fixed.

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