Second SATA hard drive isnt recognised by Vista

I have an Asus M2N-SLI currently with one Samsung 500GB sata drive as boot, and old 250GB IDE drive as backup, and have just bought and installed a new Samsung 1000GB sata drive.

The bios recognises it fine, but I'm having big problems getting vista to recognise it. It appears in Device Manager under "Other Devices", with a little question mark icon next to it. When I try and update the drive Vista says it cant find the right drivers (do i need drivers for it?).

It doesnt appear when I look in Disk Management at all, so I cant partition it. I've ran the samsung ESTools program from dos and the drive is fine. I have the latest nForce drivers installed.

What the hell do I have to do to get Vista to recognise it?

On a possibly related note, I've recently had problems adding new USB memory devices. (usb sticks, ipods etc). Vista kept asking for the drivers each time. I've sorta solved that but not fully. the ipod works but another usb stick i cant get to work. Related?

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers,

Chris.

right click on my computer, click manage.

Under the storage tab on the left, go to disk management. You'll see all your partitions at the bottom, the new drive will be the unallocated one.

Right click the unallocated space and go to format.

does it show as installed in the BIOS?

edit: i'm a burk and didn't read properly :P



oooh, a samsung f1, i think this is a common problem (well i've seen it before on this forum)

i can't remember how to fix it tho...

Yeh it appears fine in the bios. No problems at all. I've even tried switching it from the Sata 2 port to Sata 3, so it appears under Port 0 of the second Nvidid nForce Sata controller. No difference.

I'm tearing my hair out!

Does that have a JMicron or Silicon Image SATA controller as well as the NVIDIA one? If so, stick it in one of their ports and see if it works. It did on my Samsung drive (Intel controller wouldn't recognise it). This seems like quite a common problem with certain Samsung drives - another reason I stick to WD.

If you've still no joy, I guess it's an RMA job.

not sure about the other ports, i'll have a look tomorrow and give it a try. cheers. chris.

I had a similar 'disk not seen' issue which turned out to be that one of my SATA buses was off by default. Turning the SATA bus on via the Bios fixed it.

You can go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management >
Disk Management. Select the disk, and initalize it and format it in there.