Internal SATA Hard Drive Connections Question (***update***)

[Starbuck1975]

I recently ordered and received a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive.

Western Digital Caviar

In my original post, I asked if my hard drive was broken because it was missing the standard legacy 4 prong power adapter. After looking at WDs website, I didnt realize that SATA devices now have their own power plug.

I connected the hard drive, and my bios is detecting it just fine. However, once windows starts up, when I go to MY COMPUTER, the drive is not listed.

So how do I get Windows to now detect the drive?

 

[montag451]

It needs to be partitioned and formatted.

Boot into win,
Control panel
Administrative tools
Computer management
Disk management

Should be able to see it in there - partition it - format it and should be fine afterwards

 

[Zepper]

Yup, drives have to be partitioned and formatted before Win will see them. Do as above or use your favorite partitioning tool.

.bh.

 

[btcomm1]

^What he said, you have to initialize the disk by clicking on it, then create a partition then format it.

 

[Starbuck1975]

I ran Disk Manager after finding a tutorial on the WD tech support web.

Of course, windows only recognized 300GB of the 320GB hard drive.

 

[montag451]

The 320GB is not an exact measurement.
The 'company' will approximate the measurements - you don't want to know that there are 65536 Bytes in 64KB (not 64000 B) etc.
So, you lose about 2.5% on their measurement before you start.

Check in disk management if there are any other partitions etc.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Originally posted by: Starbuck1975
I ran Disk Manager after finding a tutorial on the WD tech support web.

Of course, windows only recognized 300GB of the 320GB hard drive.

That is correct, you are only going to get that much because they say that 320GB = 320,000,000,000 bytes, when actually 320GB = 343,597,383,680 bytes. This is because 1GB = 1024MB, and 1MB = 1024KB, and 1KB = 1024 bytes.

Just the way it is unfortunately.

 

[Zepper]

The drive makers use decimal instead of the proper binary sizing to have a larger capacity for advertising purposes.

.bh.