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

[stevenroy.livejournal.com]

Probably not.

Right-click "My Computer", choose "Manage" and find "Disk Management". Your new drive should show up there. (If not, something else is wrong. Try to find it in "Device Manager".) If it really is a new drive, and hasn't been partitioned and formatted yet, it will show up in the bottom list with a black bar and the word "Unallocated". Right-click there, choose "New Partition" and you will be guided through the process of setting up a file system on the drive.

If there already is a partition set up and formatted with a valid file system (preferably NTFS but FAT32 is supported too), and it shows up on the list as "Healthy", confirm that it has a drive letter assigned. If not, you can quickly right-click and assign one.

[kusanagi-sama.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I forgot about this. Brand new un-partitioned drives do not show up in My Computer.

Though, since Windows 2000, they designed a limit of 32GB partitions using FAT32 (Despite the 127GB limit of FAT32). It is best to use NTFS for its reliability and ability to self heal.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

Dude! Awesome! Doing what you said brought up the new disk wizard. I'm off to the races!

[stevenroy.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help!

Just out of curiosity, how much memory do you have in that computer?

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

I'm maxed out at 2GB. I just upgraded from 1.25 last month. I now have one extra slot on my SATA card, and another disk to install as soon as I can figure out how to get power to it. The original power cable only had one SATA power canon on it. So I can get at least another year's use out of this box before I need to upgrade.