Can't install second hard drive

narnar2000

Hi all,
I installed a second hard drive today. Everything is fine in the BIOS, the drive is found/recognised etc., but when I load W2000 it tries to install the drive, even though the utility I downloaded from the hard drive manufacturer's website says it's been installed.

If I go through the installation in Windows, it prompts me for a driver location, but I don't have any drivers for the hard drive. If I ask it to display a list of suitable drivers it says it can't find any. I have Win98 also on the original hard drive, and it recognises the new drive immediately without attempting to install etc.

Anyone know how I can get W2000 to install the drive? I've looked on the manufacturer's site (westerndigital.com) but they don't supply any drivers...

Thanks.

K!LL!@N

You know the jumper that lets you select master, slave or cable select?
Well try taking that off completely.
Then reboot.

Killian

narnar2000

I tried that. At startup, the new drive was not recognised in 'IDE Devices', then it crawled along and hung at the point where Windows usually boots...

What was supposed to happen?

Thanks

GRAHAM2002

How old is the H\D you are trying to install ?

elexes

never seen a computer ask for a driver for a hdd . point it to you system folders as ur already using a driver for the primary . u sure u have the disk activated?

narnar2000

The HDD is brand new - here it is:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=32

I've searched high and low for suitable drivers on my machine - I've pointed it at the System folders (but it needs a specific file) but like you (elexes) said, it's strange that it should ask for a driver at all...

I have W98 on the same original drive and it has no problems with the new drive - doesn't ask for drivers or any of that nonsense.
Western Digital supplies a utility (Data Lifeguard v10.0) that's supposed to install, partition and format the new drive. I ran it and partitioned and formatted the new drive. After that, W98 sees the new drive and everything's fine but W2000 tries to install it again...

It is being seen as a hard drive - I've checked Device Manager and Computer Management. There are no relevant logs in the Event Viewer.

If I try to format the drive from Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, it tells me 'the operation cannot be completed because the drive has not been activated. Please reboot to activate the drive'. Rebooting has no effect.

Any more ideas?

Thanks.

elexes

right click on my computer > manage > disk management > should show all the disks there and show one not activated ...

Dempsey

Originally posted by narnar2000
The HDD is brand new - here it is:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=32



Western Digital supplies a utility (Data Lifeguard v10.0) that's supposed to install, partition and format the new drive. I ran it and partitioned and formatted the new drive. After that, W98 sees the new drive and everything's fine but W2000 tries to install it again...

Thanks.

I have western digital disks aswell, never needed to use that software to format the disk, the OS Setup usually offers to do this ,if needed, for you.

Never heard of having to install drivers for a hard disk.

Do you have the hard disk in as secondary and trying to install a OS while having a primary disk with an OS already on it?
Check the Hard Disk Pre_Delay aswell, increase it to the maximum to eliminate that being a problem.

Capt'n Midnight

Does your BIOS support that size of drive (had that problem - 60GB drive happy all works - 80GB drive - bios saw drive but wrong size...) Don't blindly upgrade it - check the readmes.

Next setup the drive on it's own (ie disconnect your original drive) as a master on the primary controller - use fdisk or start the install rountine - this way you will have a bootable drive - if you ever need to swap them...

Next setup the drive as the only device on the secondry controller (if you use windows you should have copied the win9x or i386 folder off the CD and onto your HDD long ago. ) Then you can put the original drive back in it's place.

If it is detected then you can start playing with jumpers (but any recent PC & cables should be cable select ..)

Long winded - and only needed if you are having problems.

narnar2000

Thanks all for the replies.

First, elexes:
Under Disk Management I see my two disks - Disk 0 says C: 28.62 GB FAT32 Healthy (System)

and

Disk 1 says 74.53 GB Unallocated.

If I try to create a partition and format, the egg timer comes up for a couple of minutes then an error message:

"The operation did not complete because the partition/volume is not enabled. Please reboot the computer to enable the partition/volume."

Rebooting makes no difference - again, Windows tries to 'install' the HDD and Disk Management does not show a drive letter for the new drive.


Dempsey:
I'm not trying to install an OS on the new disk, I just want it for extra storage.


Capt'n Midnight:
I couldn't swear that my BIOS supports big drives, but I upgraded it just a week or two ago. My motherboard is an Abit KT7A, and the BIOS is dated 11/07/2002. It's a fairly new mobo...


I'm starting to think that maybe something's amiss with my W2000... I installed a CD writer after the second hard drive and now Windows is trying to install that too at startup even though it's already installed... ugh. But W98 sees everything fine, no problems with the new HDD or CD writer...

My IDE setup is this:

Primary Master: Maxtor HDD (the original HDD)
Primary Slave: Western Digital HDD (new)
Secondary Master: DVD Player (the original optic disk)
Secondary Slave: CD Writer (new)

This is what's shown to me at startup... it looks OK, right?

Thanks again.

Ba$tard

What SP are you on in win2k?

Remove your optical devices and put the new HD on the second IDE controller and try again.

Did you setup any non-MS partitions on this new HD? say ext3, etc ?

Cheers. James.

narnar2000

Hi Ba$tard - thanks for the reply.

I have SP3 on W2000. I'll give your suggesion a shot - I would have tried changing them about except that all the drives are working fine in W98...

narnar2000

Ba$tard - no, I have no non-MS partitions either...

elexes

Support up to 137GB HDD and above.


thats from the website .. use the hdd limiter and see if that will work .

maxheadroom

I had similar problems with my Seagate Barracuda V 80GB 2MB Cache - turns out my DVD rom was having DMA problems, and fscking up the entire IDE subsystem. I dropped the DVD into PIO mode and haven't had a problem since...

narnar2000

I put in my W2000 CD to attempt a repair - it didn't even recognise that W2000 was already on the computer! Anyway, I 'upgraded' to W2000 and the problem went away.

I have a theory: I installed the drivers eircom sent out with their USB modem and they crashed my machine. Furthermore, I couldn't even reboot afterwards. So, I used an Emergency Repair Disk that I made from a laptop running W2000 (needless to say I had overwritten my own ERD).

This copied a lot of config files etc from the laptop's setup to my machine and I think this may be why W2000 didn't like my new hard drive (or new CD writer, for that matter) - it thought it was running on a laptop?

So, the long and the short of it is, it's working now. So, I've spent the last 3-4 hours reinstalling W2000 and then the service packs and then the updates....

Anyway, thanks to all for the help.