Dude, where's my disk?

[theoldwolf]

So I have this Dell Inspiron 1100 with 2 IDE hard drives and 2 optical drives. I figure I'll slip a SATA controller in there and get some extra storage going.

Find the drivers, install them, plug in the controller and the disk... and nothing.

Went to my BIOS setup screen and I can't figure out how to get this extra disk recognized by the system.

Any ideas from the w1z4rd h4xx0rz out there?

[Edit:] Huge thanks to my commenters who found an answer for me - It turns out that the Disk Management option is something I had never played with in all my years of using XP, and it was waiting to create a new volume and format it. Huzzah!]

Comments

[makovette.livejournal.com]

This is Tricksy.

I strongly recommend parsing the Dell tech support forums at dell.com for the solution for that specific model.

CYa!
Mako

[slovoni.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Did you upgrade the bios?

[stevenroy.livejournal.com]

I've never tried this myself. Either my MBs have built-in SATA support or I don't bother with SATA.

But at least here's how I think it would work:

The drive itself probably won't be recognized directly by the BIOS. It will be the controller card that accesses the drive; you just need the computer to recognize the card.

If you won't be booting from the new drive, you can probably get away with just installing your controller's drivers (you might not even need any aside from standard IDE controller support) in Windows (or whatever you use) and that should be enough to get the new drive working. (Windows usually just bypasses the BIOS whenever possible anyway, because it's faster.)

If you want to boot from the SATA drive, look for something in the BIOS setup that says "Boot from option ROM" or "Enable other boot devices" instead. The controller card might have its own setup utility too (look for a "press TAB" prompt during bootup) for enabling booting from the drive. Depending on how your BIOS supports this (assuming it supports it at all!), you'd technically be booting from the controller card instead of the drive, but it's pretty much the same thing anyway.

Well, that's my theories at least. I hope I helped, at least a little! (Don't make me come down there!)