WD Raptor not seen by BIOS

[PlatinumFX]

I recently bought a known to be working WD360GD from a friend. I have plugged it in and tryed the following things, but I just cannot get it to be seen in the BIOS, POST or windows itself. N.B. the drive is getting hot after "use".

- Checked the power (4 pin molex) and data leads are plugged in.
- Changed the data lead.
- Enabled both SATA itself, and also tryed booting with the SATA Raid enabled and disabled.
- Tryed plugging it in to both SATA connections on the motherboard.
- Updated BIOS to current version (27).
- Installed the most up to date drivers for the Silicon Image Sil3112.

Interesting notes:

- In the "Standard CMOS Features" screen of the BIOS, I was expecting to see at the very least, a table showing the two SATA channels. This is not even presented. Whether thats normal or not; I dont know. If I removed for example a DVD drive from the IDE cable, I would expect to see an empty line for say the secondary slave channel.
- With the SATA RAID controller enabled, very briefly (less than a second) some text is displayed during post, that I imagine relates to RAID options. I imagine this is quite normal (given I have no RAID setup) but I thought I should put down as much as I know.
- Upon first enabling the SATA controller, and booting to windows; the Sil3112 was detected and installed first time with no errors whatsoever.

I am running Windows XP Pro SP1 + Updates.

The drive was fine apparently on Friday and I am at a complete loss now as to what I can do. Is there a BIOS or jumper setting I have missed? I thought SATA has abandoned the idea of Master and Slave drives. Ive searched the forums, and also checked the Abit support pages; not finding anything to get me closer to a solution.

Help please!

[Splash]

what board are you using? Usually there's an option in the BIOS to enable SCSI or similar.

Saying that if the Sil3112 controller is picked up (is it just a Silicon Image controller or do you have another? Could be that you have enabled one controller and have the drive plugged into a different controller) you should be able to go into device manager and check if a drive is seen attached to it. If you check the Device Info tab for the controller you should be able to check both channels on the controller - lemme see if I can get a screenshot...


EDIT - should look something like this



If you see no disk on either channel of the controller it would suggest that your drive isn't being picked up. If it does then you need to initialise the drive (right click My Computer, select Manage then goto Disk Management.) and all should be fine. Any more probs post back with the details fo your board.

Also it may be that you need to set the drive up in the RAID BIOS - I believe it's Ctrl+f4 on boot to access that.

[PlatinumFX]

Ive just got it fixed!
I poked around in the BIOS further, and missed a subtle option to perform a low level format. Once it had done this, I was able to remove it from raid array 0 it had so kindly put it in, the minute I added the drive; meaning it was free to be seen by windows as a single drive in its own right. When I got to the Disk Management console, I was able to not only see it, but get it to the stage where I could format a single volume.

Cheers for your response anyway Splash.

[Splash]

no probs mate - glad you got it sorted!