Added new HDD; now neither is recognised!

ionapaul

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new PC from Ankermann, and within the 1st week Vista started warning me that the 500GB SATA HDD was failing, a few days later I started getting warnings to the same effect (S.M.A.R.T. Bad) during boot. Today I picked up a new 640GB SATA HDD from Elara, installed it immediately next to the other one, connected it with an old SATA cable I had hanging around - the computer would start but neither HDD is now recognised during boot, though the SATA DVD/RW is recognised fine. I disconnect one and the other and still neither is recognised at any stage! Both are SATA II as far as I can tell, and both have the jumpers in limiting them to SATA I.

Anyone any clue why this is happening?!!! Now I'd be happy to get back to when the 1st one was just warning me but I could at least use the computer!

Thanks

Gadgetman496

ionapaul wrote: »

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new PC from Ankermann, and within the 1st week Vista started warning me that the 500GB SATA HDD was failing, a few days later I started getting warnings to the same effect (S.M.A.R.T. Bad) during boot. Today I picked up a new 640GB SATA HDD from Elara, installed it immediately next to the other one, connected it with an old SATA cable I had hanging around - the computer would start but neither HDD is now recognised during boot, though the SATA DVD/RW is recognised fine. I disconnect one and the other and still neither is recognised at any stage! Both are SATA II as far as I can tell, and both have the jumpers in limiting them to SATA I.

Anyone any clue why this is happening?!!! Now I'd be happy to get back to when the 1st one was just warning me but I could at least use the computer!

Thanks

Go into the BIOS on startup & make sure both are enabled & that the boot drive sequence is correct.

-

Slaanesh

Do hard drives these days still adhere to the old Master/slave principal?

If so, your primary hard drive must be the master, set by jumpers on the back of the hard drive. If this is not the case, then ... what he said ^^^.

Elara: Kin

SATA drives don't have a slave or master jumper as they don't share cables.

ionapaul

Lads, very embarrassed After messing around with it for about an hour I discovered to my horror that I had somehow disconnected the power cable that fed both SATA drives. Sorry for wasting your time.

Got the 2nd HDD up and running last night, this morning was met with a 'BOOTMGR is missing' error during boot, supposedly common in Vista. I'm going to backup my failing primary HDD tonight and remove it and re-install Vista on the new HDD tomorrow, hopefully this will be possible. Not impressed with the whole thing since I have spent 10 hours during the last week installed all my required programmes and customising the new machine - now I'm going to have to do it all over again!

Stephen

You may not have to reinstall it all again. Boot off the Vista DVD and it should give you an option to repair it, which can fix lots of problems booting the OS. If that works then you should be able to just clone the contents of the old HD onto the new one.

mathias

'BOOTMGR is missing'

Vista is quite specific as too which hard drive controller it boots from , make sure the original hard drive is connected to its original sata controller , if its not vista wont boot.
( for instance , if the original was on SATA 1 , then thats all it will boot from )

I learned this the hard way , and also , for the same reason , Vista is a bitch to clone , Norton Ghost 14 wont do it at all .... I wasted 60 euros on that finding out.

HDclone will do it , but wont span across a bigger drive, so you end up with unwanted partitions.