My Dad recently replaced the hard drive in his PC (which was a problematic IDE drive) He got an ATA drive with an adaptor card to fit it.
Trying to install Windows XP from scratch, the setup programme says it can’t find the C drive. The drive sounds like its working, is there anything we’re not doing? The disc and adaptor didn’t come with any setup discs or the like.
When you first boot the machine, do you get a text-based screen that lists the drive as being detected by the motherboard?
I’ll check on that with Dad, but I don’t think so. Hitting “delete” on start up doesn’t seem to bring up any of the old screens I was familiar with for detecting a hard drive, I assume modern PCs do that themselves now?
BTW, thanks for the Win98 disk from a few weeks ago, works grand in my old PC 
Hmmm… is this a serial ATA drive and adaptor card? I don’t have much experience of installing those, but I think I’m right in saying they sometimes have their own built-in configuration utilities.
The drive may be spinning up (power connection alone will usually do that), but it sounds like the motherboard isn’t detecting the drive, yet.
Was there a manual with it?
As Mangetout said, you may need to configure the adapter card from its own BIOS tool. When you boot up you need to look for line of text which says something like
“Press F12 to configure SATA/RAID/Addon” this will be after the screen where it tells you how fast your CPU is and how much RAM, but before the Windows booting screen.
If this doesn’t happen, then it’s probably a driver support issue. If the card is quite new then maybe XP was released before the driver had been written. I’d go to the manufacturers website, look for your card and check the download section.
If it does have a driver disk it’ll be there for download. It will also have a short doc which explains how you get Windows to load the driver (in the case of adding the disk to an existing Windows) or how to install the driver whilst installing Windows (if you want to install Windows on the new disk).
Good luck!
Thanks all.
HD and adaptor were both new from EBay, but didn’t have a disc or manual supplied with either. I’ll look out for those messages on booting up and check for drivers online.
Under certain circumstances, you might not see the message - If the computer has a graphical splash screen (with the manufacturer’s branding, not the Windows splash screen) you might have to hit <TAB> or something to make that disappear and show the startup messages.
This is a common thing. You need a driver floppy disk for the card. At the beginning of the XP install process, you’ll see a line at the bottom that says “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver”. Press F6 at that point and follow the prompt to put in the driver disk and install the SATA driver.
Oh dear god, its SATA isn’t it? Because this is where you get to see just how old and clunky the underpinnings of windows and PCs are. It has absolutely no comprehension of serial ATA, and in order to successfully install it on a SATA drive you need to deploy the cutting edge 21st century method of watching the blue screen like a hawk, pouncing at the exact second it says “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver” and then using your trusty floppy disk or CD.
Sometimes you get a bundle of drivers for different cards from the manufacturer and then you have to guess which driver to use. Joy.
It doesn’t usually have anything to do with the BIOS (although you may have to set the boot sequence to include SCSI somewhere, since often the BIOS thinks SATA = SCSI) :smack: