hard drive installation

I just put in a 320GB HD in my Dell E510. After rebooting my PC, it doesn't show up at all. Does it automatically show up or did I screw up?

Is this a secondary drive, or did you replace your original drive?

Check your jumper settings. Most Dell ship their HDD's jumpered for Cable Select. If your new drive is jumpered for Master or Slave and you connected it to the same controller as your original CS drive, that's the problem. You'll either need to set the new HDD to CS and use a CS-compatible cable, or set it as either Master or Slave and the original drive to the opposite. Or move it to its own controller and configure it either Master or CS.

I prefer to specifically jumper my own drives for Master and Slave. I wouldn't advise mixing modes, either -- either set all drives CS no matter which controller they're on, or configure them master/slave as appropriate.

If it I were you if the new drive is on the same controller (cable) as the old drive, then set the boot drive as master and the secondary drive as slave. Otherwise set both drives as master on two different cables. I'm assuming you also have an optical drive, so you should chain your drives together -- it's never recommended to chain a HDD with an optical drive.

Its a secondary drive.
The HD I bought was an OEM so I got this off ebay
http//cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330055845858
so one drive must be master and the other slave?

well, the drive did show up in the system bios. The second SATA port was originally off, after turning it on, it still didn't work. Exactly how do I set the drive to master/slave? I can't seem to find that in the system bios.

SATA? Then forget what I said about CS/Master/Slave. That's for PATA only. I guess I should have asked... oops

SATA simplifies this whole mess. If you've enabled the extra SATA controller in BIOS, then it should just work. If BIOS sees it, what exactly is not working? You did plug in the power cable as well as the SATA cable, I'm assuming, otherwise I doubt BIOS could detect it.

What brand of drive is it? Maxtor SATA 3G drives had a problem with some SATA 150 chipsets and had to be jumpered down to SATA 150 speed before they would be detected. I was thinking the problem only affected VIA or maybe nForce chipsets though.

Its a Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive 320GB 7200.10 SATA ULTRA ATA-100 ST3320620AS
yea I see it in Bios but my PC just can't recognized the damn drive

well, after looking at "device manager"
I see the drive under "Disk drives" I right click the drive, cllick on "Scan for hardware changes" and it found the drive as a floppy drive. LOL
I think I might have mess something up a while back, my PC doesn't even have a freaking floppy drive. lol

If the drive is unpartitioned and unformatted, Windows won't be able to see it.

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage from the menu. Then on the left side under "Storage" click "Disk Management." Look at the bottom section and see if you see the drive there. Try right-clicking and selecting "Format" or "Create Partition" or something similar.

the same thing happened to me. I used norton partitionmagic and found out that most of the drive was just in space doing nothing. So I had to piece the non-existant space and the existing space together.

[quote74b4c58fdd="dmorris68"]If the drive is unpartitioned and unformatted, Windows won't be able to see it.

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage from the menu. Then on the left side under "Storage" click "Disk Management." Look at the bottom section and see if you see the drive there. Try right-clicking and selecting "Format" or "Create Partition" or something similar.[/quote74b4c58fdd]
yea...thats exactly what I did. someone in another forum helped me out. It took like 1 1/2 hours to format the damn drive. Its working now.
Sucks that a 320GB HD is actually only 298GB. ? What ever happen to the 20GB?? I mean, I understand if its short of 5GB or something but 20GB is insane.

Thanks for the help dmorris D
+k

[quote23aa46409b="GCY"][quote23aa46409b="dmorris68"]If the drive is unpartitioned and unformatted, Windows won't be able to see it.

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage from the menu. Then on the left side under "Storage" click "Disk Management." Look at the bottom section and see if you see the drive there. Try right-clicking and selecting "Format" or "Create Partition" or something similar.[/quote23aa46409b]
yea...thats exactly what I did. someone in another forum helped me out. It took like 1 1/2 hours to format the damn drive. Its working now.
Sucks that a 320GB HD is actually only 298GB. ? What ever happen to the 20GB?? I mean, I understand if its short of 5GB or something but 20GB is insane.

Thanks for the help dmorris D
+k[/quote23aa46409b]
The "missing" space is attributed to 2 factors. First, the filesystem format takes some overhead, but mostly the difference lies in the HDD standard for measurement being different than the typical computer measurement.

With HDD's
1MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
320GB = 320,000,000,000 bytes

Everything else in the computer world, including operating systems
1MB = 1,048,576 bytes
1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
320GB = 298,023,223,876 bytes

So your PC is using one unit of measurement, while the HDD manufacturers use another unit of measurement (and one that favors them because it makes their drives look bigger).

[quote64e30806d7="dmorris68"][quote64e30806d7="GCY"][quote64e30806d7="dmorris68"]If the drive is unpartitioned and unformatted, Windows won't be able to see it.

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage from the menu. Then on the left side under "Storage" click "Disk Management." Look at the bottom section and see if you see the drive there. Try right-clicking and selecting "Format" or "Create Partition" or something similar.[/quote64e30806d7]
yea...thats exactly what I did. someone in another forum helped me out. It took like 1 1/2 hours to format the damn drive. Its working now.
Sucks that a 320GB HD is actually only 298GB. ? What ever happen to the 20GB?? I mean, I understand if its short of 5GB or something but 20GB is insane.

Thanks for the help dmorris D
+k[/quote64e30806d7]
The "missing" space is attributed to 2 factors. First, the filesystem format takes some overhead, but mostly the difference lies in the HDD standard for measurement being different than the typical computer measurement.

With HDD's
1MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
320GB = 320,000,000,000 bytes

Everything else in the computer world, including operating systems
1MB = 1,048,576 bytes
1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
320GB = 298,023,223,876 bytes

So your PC is using one unit of measurement, while the HDD manufacturers use another unit of measurement (and one that favors them because it makes their drives look bigger).[/quote64e30806d7]
ahh...I see
thanks again
+k when I can

Actually, I think I confused the issue with how I noted the 320GB numbers. The values are correct, but I know they don't appear logical in the context I quoted them in.

What I was trying to illustrate was that the HDD's size of 320,000,000,000 bytes divided by the computer's notion of 1GB (1,073,741,824) equals the computer's reported size for the HDD of 298GB.

Hopefully that makes more sense. )

Glad I didn't have to explain it. ;)