Problem with HD not being recognised

Soldato
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I have an issue with a new build. My DVD RW is connecting to the mobo via a ribbon IDE cable.

My sole HD is connecting to the mobo into a SATA slot, SATA1 from five slots (2, 3 ,4 ,5)

Problem is, the HDD is not being recognised. It has the DVD as master with the Slave unrecognised. Hope this all makes sense.

How do I fix it?
 
Associate
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29 Jan 2007
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A few things to check:

Connecors seated correctly (sorry, I know obvious)
SATA cable isn't bent at 90 degrees or some other harsh angle

Also some extra info:

Can you hear the drive spinning up?
Can you see it listed when you enter Bios?
Any message on screen when it finishes post?
 
Soldato
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Done all those gentlemen. I have gotten further now and got the bios to recognise the HDD. It was set to RAID instead of IDE (if it makes a difference?) and now it's Posting as a HDD. Trying to install Win7 now.

However, the DVD RW is still set to Master. Does it make a difference


Update (before I even posted)

Ok, looks like we're game on. Now, another ******** niggling issue (I swear I will just game on consoles from now on)

I have one HDD with two partitions, I want to format one partition to install Win7 on it, but it's not letting me format it, or rather not giving me a clear option to format it. How do I go about formatting the partition?
 
Soldato
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Ok, solved it. There was an 'Advanced' tab that allowed me to format the partition. Windows is installing now.

I'm still curious about my DVD being set to Master and there being no Slave. Does it matter?
 
Associate
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Strange how it was set to RAID - the default should be IDE - that was going to be my next suggestion, load optimized defaults.

You won't need RAID - that's a special mode for two hard drives or more. IDE or AHCI is fine for Windows 7. AHCI is newer and allows hot swapping drives and NCQ (native command queuing), but really the performance between IDE and AHCI is negligible for desktop use (search Google for more info). You can't change this setting once windows is installed, so I advise setting it to AHCI before install. You may need to find drivers for the chipset if you decide to use AHCI. If not, just leave it on IDE.

As for the partitions - Windows 7 automatically creates two partitions - it's normal. I don't think you can get around this unless you partition it with something else. As for formatting, it should do that once you select a partition to install on automatically.
 
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Associate
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DVD set to master is normal - master/slave is for the old IDE/ATA connector, no longer used for modern SATA. That is absolutely normal on todays computers. You just select the boot order of your devices in bios.
 
Soldato
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Excellent and clear advice Spirits, thanks for that!

It's set to IDE but I can always change it with future installs. Already begun the install before I posted.

I did some reading at it would appear AHCI seems a tad better (faster even), so will keep that in mind for my next install.
 
Associate
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No problem, went through it all myself in the past. :)

I found no perceivable difference between IDE and AHCI - unless you require hot swapping hard drives, not worth a re-install. I think NCQ works well for servers, where they have many Read/Write requests at the same time and can order them more efficiently.
 
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