beanryu

Trust me, I did read the sticky threads and other soures online regarding this matter.
I feel really stupid and frustrated right now.
I bought this hitachi 1 TG sata2 hard drive from new egg. Well, I didn't know sata means so much troubles. I thought it is another harddrive that just allows me to use it by just putting it into the THING. I dont even know what an IDE harddrive is before this crisis. I need a new hard drive because I am using a 7 gb samsung hd I got 10 years ago because my 80 gb hard drive just died. So to stop the annoying "your hard drive space is low" message from popping up, I decided to buy a 1 TB hard drive thinking that haha I won't need no worries for the rest of my life.

Now I am really fxxxdup... I bought this thing and I am completely lost...
okay, to keep it short, I learned about it and got myself a data cable from my cousin. I read all about those controllers, but I think I don't need one because I got the sata slots on my motherboard(am I right?). So I plug in the power cable, the data cable(which is plug into the hd on one side and the motherboard on the other-no controller card).

This is what my computer has right now.
ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard,
a 7gb samsung hd that I am using now with 100 mb left (as I make this thread)
a disconnected hitachi 1tb harddrive.
I will omit the other stuff.

I disconnected the new hd because I can't get into windows with the hd connected, i will discuss what happens when the new hd is connected, but let me present another fact here:
when I check device manager, there is a yellow question mark next to an item called "raid controller". I read about it and sort of got the idea that I have to install a driver for it, but I don't know how, I put in my windows XP Pro cd and it seems I can only install the driver for "raid controller" if I install window xp again, which I dont want.

SO this is what happens when I shut down and plug all the cables into the new hd.
It will go through everything fine(pass the part where I guess every expert call POST). At the very beginning, I went into bios and see that bios didn't detect the new HD, i try to make it detect it but it just doesn't. So I let it go past POST and that's where I got stuck.
The following appears:

press control s or f4 for raid(something like this)

0 hitachi78xxc7xc87v98x(there is some long butt number after hitachi which i can't quite remember, but something like that)

That is where I am stuck, there is no response to any input, so I made myself into thinking that it's formatting the new hd even though it shows 0 not 0%. But after 2 hours its still 0, nothing changes. I know its 1 TG, but it should at least be more than 1%. If an 80gb takes 4 hours, than 2 hours of a 1024 gb hd should be at least 1%. Or maybe my computer is too old?

Please guys, give me some thoughts. Is the new hd being formatted when I see:
0 hitachi37msludsi889?
I just want to use the new hd as another hard that stores stuff just like my 7gb one. Not anything pro like backing up the primary hd.

manic

Plug the drive in the sata slot on the board. Boot up go into bios
and disable raid. Set bios to treat sata drives as ide, "ide enabled".
Make sure that the drive is not in the sata 1 slot, with some boards
that is for the boot drive, I dont know if it really matters, but better
safe than sorry. Once booted up and bios sees drive you will have to
go into device manager, format the drive for use...

Tumbleweed36

Manic as usual has given good advice. There is one other obstacle you may face with this setup and that is your board supports only Sata I and this is most likely a Sata II drive. Therefore, you must set that drive to Sata I so it is seen by the motherboard properly.

Here is some imformation that might be helpful:

Most drives use a jumper to lock the data rate to Sata I. However, instead of using "jumpers" to lock the data rate to 150mb/sec to make the drive compatible with SATA 1rst Generation Controllers, Hitachi uses a Utility known as "Feature Tool" that you can get from here

Feature Tool

Here are instructions on how to use the tool:

Instructions for Hitachi Feature Tool

The preferred method of using this tool to change the drive to a SATA Type I or SATA 1rst Generation type is by creating a bootable floppy disk. But if you don't have a floppy drive there is also a CD Image that you can burn to CD to use the utility as a bootable CD

Once you change the firmware of the drive, then it should be recognized by the controller and work like any other Sata drive.

If you want the drive to be a bootable drive (with OS on it), be sure to load the Sata or Raid drivers if you are using XP, and then it should be fully usable as a bootable drive. With Vista, drivers should already be present with the OS disk when you set it up.

If you want the drive simply as storage, you don't have to load the Sata drivers with either XP or Vista.