how to reinstall a hard drive after a reformat

[minofifa]

hi everybody,
well i have just put a new version of windows xp on my computar and this is the first time i have started from scratch per se. i have had success installing the drivers for everything except for the extra hard drives. I can not get them to show up. How would i go about setting them up so windows recognizes them?

on the motherboard CD there is a SATA/RAID driver but when i install it, it ddoesn't do much, it says i have to configure something. Besides i'm not even sure i have a SATA setup and i know i definately don't have a RAID setup. are there other setups for hard drives? i don't have a CD with any hard drive drivers but the people at the computer store got themt to show up when they put the computer together for me in the first place. I don't wanto call them as i don't have time.

Thanks for the help

 

[Matthias99]

If you have regular IDE hard drives, there aren't any drivers to install. They should just show up as long as you have them hooked up properly (you'll see them in your BIOS hard drive display at bootup if they're hooked up).

If you have SATA hard drives (how could you not know???), you may need to install drivers for your SATA controller (they would be included with your motherboard drivers if it's onboard).

 

[minofifa]

i'm pretty sure i have IDE but honestly i don't know for sure. anyway to tell? SATA are really expensive aren't they? mine weren't that expensive so i'm thinking i have IDE

 

[Gunbuster]

Controll Pannel, admin tools, computer managment, disk managment, partition, format.

 

[minofifa]

so my best bet is just to play around with the bios and they should just show up? i know for sure that they are installed properly because they worked fine before i reformateed.

 

[Thegonagle]

Originally posted by: minofifa
i'm pretty sure i have IDE but honestly i don't know for sure. anyway to tell? SATA are really expensive aren't they? mine weren't that expensive so i'm thinking i have IDE

No, they're not very expensive; they're generally a few bucks more if everything else is equal. (The super-high performance drives, which happen to use SATA, are expensive.)

Here's how you know:

Look at the data cables: Skinny cables with 3/4 wide connectors = SATA; wide, flat (or 1cm thick round) cables with 2 inch wide connectors = regular IDE.