problems installing WD SATA 36gig Hardrive

[MasterRich]

hey all i have bought another Western Digital Serial SATA 36gig Hard Drive to be used as a slave, and when i connect the hardrive to the SATA 2 slot on my motherboard and boot up my pc, it detects IDE Drives but takes 2 mins or so for it to find my CD/DVD drives and hard disks but only shows the 1 SATA drive (windows vista is installed on) If i unplug my drives and leave the new SATA drive connected it finds it. So i put re-connected my disks back one by one and wolla they all connected and working. Now i get a msg

CPU is unworkable or has been changed......

If i hit delet and enter the bios (softmenu) and exit and save settings and restart it dosn't show the hardrive agian and i get NTFS error and have to restart. I did manage to Press F1 to skip it and load windows and allocate my new hardrive and put some stuff on there and all is good and working. But i need some help to get my pc to detect it without it hanging at the start when it finds my devices. I h ave got both a standard SATA cable and a SecureConnect SATA cable. Both works fine so its not the cables.

Thanks for your help

My hardware specs:

Windows Vista Home Premium
ABIT IC7-G 478 Motherboard

Pentium 4 3.0Ghz
1gig DDR Ram (2x 512mb)

2 hardrives (same)
C:\ Western Digital Serial SATA 36gig
F:\ Western Digital Serial SATA 36gig
Nvidia 7800Gs

DVD Drive and DVDRW

 

[murdoch]

Hello & Welcome to the forum MasterRich.

I don't know much about Vista, But have you altered the BIOS at all??
But i do suggest you check all cables, re-check that the master/slave is correct.

 

[MasterRich]

thanks

yes i have checked the cables my primary master drive works fine with any cables the bios is fine i have enabled the SATA controllers etc. I thought it could be the SATA slot 2 that could be faulty but it isnt I tried connecting it to SATA1 and stil the same problem no problem with the drive just i have to go into the bios to save settings and restart and then it wont detect it it's really weird. Also i had another IDE drive on a controller thath wouldnt load into windows even with both sata drives working, said Disk failare. I dont know if the SATA needs any jumpers to set the drive to master/slave cause that's all done by the SATA slots on the board but the main windows drive is set to master and other to slave automactially when they are both working

 

[muckshifter]

This is nothing to do with Vista ...


Abit MBs have this "problem" often, as do a few others.

Go into your BIOS and make a note of all the settings, sorry, but you will need to write them down ... if you know how to re-setup your BIOS than you can skip all the writing.

The point is, you need to re-set the BIOS, in doing so, you will need to reset or re-tell it, what CPU you are using and some RAM settings ... maybe a few other setting also.

Read your manual on how best to re-set the BIOS

The easiest way is to use the onboard jumper for such a purpose, or, use the BIOS and tell it to use "Setup Defaults" ... same affect.

Do all this with your new HD in place ...


Oh, one point ... if you use the re-set jumper to reset the BIOS, make sure you have the PC un-pluged from the wall socket.

 

[MasterRich]

ah ok thanks =) yea i can reset it using the jumper on the MB and i do unplug the power cable from the computer and i always press the power button to charge out what power is left before i start moving or touching stuff...I'll see if that works and I'll leave the new hardrive pluged in while i do this...I'll let you know if it works when i get home. Need to see if my pc loads my HD without probs before i reset the CMOS

Thanks!

 

[muckshifter]

ah ok thanks =) yea i can reset it using the jumper on the MB and i do unplug the power cable from the computer and i always press the power button to charge out what power is left before i start moving or touching stuff...I'll see if that works and I'll leave the new hardrive pluged in while i do this...I'll let you know if it works when i get home. Need to see if my pc loads my HD without probs before i reset the CMOS

Thanks!

Good idea ...

You can press F1 and the system should load normally, I do not recommend this as a permanent "fix" to the problem ... most of the time it is the BIOS that has had a slight problem interpreting that you installed new hardware ... sorry, but Abit are err, well know for this hiccup ... they ain't alone.

 

[MasterRich]

hehee yea seems my work mate did some searching and found simlar problems that required the cmos to be reset when there is some hardware changes if my pc dosnt detect my hardrive when i boot it up then i'll reset the cmos and hopefully that should get this sucker to work

 

[muckshifter]

LoL ... well at least you didn't just take my word for it.

 

[MasterRich]

Lol