Invisible 120GB HDD

[thoma?]

I've just been to a computer fair, and purchased a 120 GB ibm deskstar HD with a 8 MB buffer. When i hooked it up to my system, it was nowhere to be seen. I'm upgrading from a $0 GB Seagate Barracuda drive, so i dont think it's anything to do with the 512mb disk limit assosciated with older pcs. Any help would be appreciated!

[j2buttonsw]

Have you partitioned it? In XP/2000 go to disk manager (right-click My Computer > manage and its in there) and create a partition on your new drive before formatting it. In Windows 9x/ME you will have to boot from a Windows 98 startup disk (Start > settings > control panel > add and remove programs > 3rd tab is the startup disk one) and use fdisk to create a partion (make sure you create a partion on the new drive). Once you have a partition you can format it within Windows.

[lisaj]

I take it you do have an ATA disk controller and ATA cable? Next step, check your BIOS to ensure it's going to auto-detect all four (or more) ATA channels - if this is disabled, it simply won't use the drive. Next step is to check that the drive is listed on boot-up when the BIOS scans the devices. If everything's good up to this point, then you're free to use fdisk (if you're in a non-NT environment), or use Disk Manager (if you are in an NT environment) to partition and format the drive.

[MrPooHead]

How old's your motherboard? Some that are over about a year or two now need the bios updating to accomodate drives over 20Gb. It doesn't matter about the cables as far as it actually SHOWING UP in yer bios goes, it just won't work as it should unless you have 80 conductor IDE (ATA) cables.

[thoma?]

after reading these replies, i probably wouldnt have done 1/2 the stuff i did, but somehow, it's working nicely on 98, and i'm happy to say my seagate is running linux on the same system. thanks for the help all, thoma�