[Ham-Computers] Installed new SATA hard drive, brief problem overcome

[Philip, KO6BB]

Hi,

This week I replaced the WD 320GB SATA "D" drive(nearly full) with a Seagate 
500GB SATA drive.  The Seagate was on sale for much less than I paid for the 
WD (which was also on sale when I bought it).

Rather than using the bootable "Copy Commander" CD to "clone" the drives 
prior to installation, I decided to use the disk provided by Seagate for the 
task, performing the cloning action while in Windows.

Even though the operating system (XP-Pro SP3) found the "New Hardware" and 
properly identified it, loading the drivers etc, the drive didn't show up in 
"My Computer" (it DID show up under hardware in the control panel).

Anyway, figuring that perhaps the drive needed files to be recognized, I 
went ahead and cloned the drive OK (1:40 to copy the drive), removed the old 
320GB drive (which still has all my OTR mP3's for backup) and closed the 
computer up.  Still NO "D" drive displayed in "My Computer", so I couldn't 
access the files on the new drive.

So, I went online to the MS site and searched for "SATA Drive recognition". 
That brought up a page telling me to open the "control panel", then 
"Administrative tools", "Computer management",  "Disk Management" and assign 
a drive letter to the drive. I assigned it "Drive D", rebooted the machine 
and the new drive was then perfectly usable!!  I had a fully cloned 500 GB 
installed and working in less than 3 hours after I got home with it 
(including the 1:40 cloning time).

This is REALLY puzzling because I NEVER had to go through this before when I 
added a SATA Drive to this same machine, the computer automatically assigned 
a drive letter, and the operating system has been XP-Pro all along. . .

Yes, I read here awhile back about somebody else that had problems 
installing a SATA drive, but I didn't keep that Email as I'd never had a 
problem ;-)

FINAL NOTE:  This Seagate 500GB drive is MUCH faster than the old WD 320GB 
drive.  I have over 36,000 MP3 files on it, when I search for a certain 
file, containing say "Mountain" (as in "The Mountain of Diamond"), it goes 
through all 36,000 files and brings up every file containing "Mountain" 
almost immediately.  I don't have "File Indexing" turned on either.

73 de Phil,  KO6BB
http://www.geocities.com/ko6bb/index.html
http://ko6bb.multiply.com/

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