O.K So I just installed a 200GB SATA drive into my computer. This is my second hard drive, the first being a 250 gig drive set to be the slave. I first installed the drive and booted into Windows 7 Build 7137 (I dualboot that and Windows XP SP3).
All went well. I went into computer management and I formatted the SATA drive (it had two partitions, both of which showed up). It locked up during the formatting of the second partition so I exited computer management and went back into it. Nothing of the drive is visible, not the partitions or unpartitioned space.
I restart my computer, still nothing. I check my BIOS, the device is found. I upgrade my BIOS and check for updated drivers, still nothing. I boot up XP and see the drive and give a sigh of relief. I format the drive using NTFS and I leave the computer for an hour. I come back and poof, the drive is gone again, not showing up as properly formatted with the drive letter I assigned or under unpartitioned space.
I check BIOS again, still there. I boot back into Windows 7, still nothing. I'm curious just as to what the problem could be. I checked the cables and they seem to be connected just fine. I purchased a power cable for the SATA drive (4-pin to SATA power adapter) so could it be that that's faulty? I'm out of ideas since neither operating system seems to find it but BIOS finds it just fine. Oh and it doesn't seem to show up under device manager either.
This is a shot in the dark but how many watts is your power supply a similar issue came up with me using the stock power supply that came with my store bought pc it was only 300watts and I already had s video card, wireless adapter, a cdrw, dvd rom and the original hard drive so my issue was I didn't have enough juice to run everything I had to upgrade to a 450watt supply and everything was great afterwards. My issue really was the cpu and video card really used alot of electricity so it was very overloaded.
Wouldn't be a western digital hdd would it...lol.. mine was installed for around 4 months when it began to drop itself out of being recognized,reboot & it ain't there,install it to a external housing & it reappears,while it's there i remove the data i need again while in the process it dropped out,i managed eventually to get the data but the drive just will no longer get detected by comp or USB now.
There is also the issue of the hard reboot causing an improper drive dismount this can lead to corrupted tables,tho it should still appear in comp manage or it will take a while before it gets recognized & partitions are no longer there.switching the cables will solve the is it the cable issue,the BIOS seeing it is odd perhaps it does need divers however unlikely that is nowadays
If running a system from 2005 forward I would not suspect a need for drivers especially if using Vista now if using XP and it's not up to date with the latest service pack it's possible.
