a new twist to the win7/ sata hdd issue

Ok I’ll start at the beginning, I put together a pc and having issue’s with win7 64bit setup seeing my sata2 hdd it’s a western digital caviler blue 500 gig drive and gigabyte mb [full details on my profile] in the bios I tried sata in native ide also ahci those letters might be mixed up [the setting for using hot swapping & esata] under ahci there is an option for port 4/5 as sata or ide I tried both. and bois seen the hdd in every setting I tried and on all the mb sata ports also. tried new driver from gigabyte and upgraded the bios still don’t see it So then I used my old 40 gig ide hdd and it seen it right away no prob windows installed fine. so I put in my sata hdd turned the pc on and it seen the hdd right away installed a driver and was ready to format. so I tried to install windows again by just popping in cd and running setup still windows setup did not see it I am lost for idea’s now maybe a sata driver problem but should that be an issue in ide mode? all the ports seem good since bios seen it every time and in every slot the hdd seems alright worked fine as a back up setup just don’t see it is there another setting in bios I’m overlooking? is there a sata as ide driver I need? I’ve read the manual cover to cover more then a few times it explains how to load the sata drivers during setup and I did, windows seems to install the driver then just says no drives found. according to windows site the hdd has a check mark for 64 bit and is compatible I have read hundreds of posts on this subject since it’s been an ongoing problem for 3 weeks and my old ide hdd died last night. there is post on the win 7 sata hdd issue on every tech site most seem to fix issue by running an ide mode this don’t for my problem you know windows xp fixed 2000 issues and I thought win7 would fix vista’s drivers issues but instead ms just denies a bug even though u see post on every tech site on the sata issue not sure if I’m just doing something wrong maybe any help would be greatly appreciated full pc specs in profile thanks in advance

oh yeah if it matters i used a usb flash drive to load the drivers and do i turn off the sata controller in ide mode? i didn't think so but ? is there a bootable default microsoft sata driver? thats the driver it uses as a back up but it's not a bootable one

chris1 said:

Ok I’ll start at the beginning, I put together a pc and having issue’s with win7 64bit setup seeing my sata2 hdd it’s a western digital caviler blue 500 gig drive and gigabyte mb [full details on my profile] in the bios I tried sata in native ide also ahci those letters might be mixed up [the setting for using hot swapping & esata] under ahci there is an option for port 4/5 as sata or ide I tried both. and bois seen the hdd in every setting I tried and on all the mb sata ports also. tried new driver from gigabyte and upgraded the bios still don’t see it So then I used my old 40 gig ide hdd and it seen it right away no prob windows installed fine. so I put in my sata hdd turned the pc on and it seen the hdd right away installed a driver and was ready to format. so I tried to install windows again by just popping in cd and running setup still windows setup did not see it I am lost for idea’s now maybe a sata driver problem but should that be an issue in ide mode? all the ports seem good since bios seen it every time and in every slot the hdd seems alright worked fine as a back up setup just don’t see it is there another setting in bios I’m overlooking? is there a sata as ide driver I need? I’ve read the manual cover to cover more then a few times it explains how to load the sata drivers during setup and I did, windows seems to install the driver then just says no drives found. according to windows site the hdd has a check mark for 64 bit and is compatible I have read hundreds of posts on this subject since it’s been an ongoing problem for 3 weeks and my old ide hdd died last night. there is post on the win 7 sata hdd issue on every tech site most seem to fix issue by running an ide mode this don’t for my problem you know windows xp fixed 2000 issues and I thought win7 would fix vista’s drivers issues but instead ms just denies a bug even though u see post on every tech site on the sata issue not sure if I’m just doing something wrong maybe any help would be greatly appreciated full pc specs in profile thanks in advance

personally I would stick with IDE mode

I use the western digital caviar blue 500gb drive and the 320gb on my biostar board and for it to work I had to leave the IDE controllers on auto otherwise windows refused to see the sata drives for install despite loading drivers,

It now works perfectly for me and I dont need hot swop, I reckon by the time I shift to my next build AHCI might be working properly

would like use ide mode but my windows setup won't see it, my old ide hdd went out last night so now I'm stuck with nothing don't want to buy another ide hdd if i can help it am i just overlooking something simple in my bios settings?

It is a little confusing, but SATA drives can be set to IDE, AHCI, or RAID. This IDE does not mean the same thing as a PATA drive.

If the drives are going to work, they should work in IDE, but if you use AHCI, they should also work. The situation is you cannot change them from IDE to AHCI after you install, unless you do a registry hack.

What port do you have the Drive on now? Hopefully SATA 0, but some motherboards have separate controllers for the extra SATA connectors so you do not want it on one of those.

Do you have SATA turned on in the bios? It is normally by default, but you might make sure. If you check the Drive order or Boot priority, do you see the hard drive listed in the bios?

yes it's in sata 0, the sata controller is enabled, when i used my old ide hdd to install windows my sata hdd would show up just fine but when i boot from cd, set-up will not see it maybe i'm loading the driver wrong, do you just boot from disk then when the screen that ask what drive to install to windows on click the load driver tab this is what i did, driver was seen, thought it installed, but just comes up after the driver is installed and says no drives found do i somehow load the driver before i boot windows from cd? right now without my old hdd working it won't see the sata drive, in windows set up bios still sees it is there anyother bios settings involved besides the sata controller and sata type?

I have never needed to add a driver for my SATA drives on either of my machines. Possibly if yours is brand new, it might be necessary. There are some other threads that discuss this and I believe some nvidia chipsets needed drivers.

You might try hitting refresh while in the partition install windows to recheck the drive.

On the screen where it asks where to install, does it show just unallocated space, or nothing at all? If it shows unallocated space, you need to partition the drive. Doing so during the install will give you the 100mb System Reserved partition. If you do not want that, format prior to installation.

If it shows nothing at all and you have added the drivers you think you need, make sure you are not adding RAID drivers instead of SATA drivers.

Something you might try while you are on the partition install page is hit Shift+F10.
type Diskpart to start the routine. Hit enter after each.
type: list disk
and it should come back with a listing of your drives. If it shows Disk 0, then it is being seen. If you want to format from here, you can, so let us know.
Type: exit
to get out of diskpart, then exit again to close the window.

You might try using a third party utility like GParted or Partition Wizard to see if you can see the drive. Even something like a DOS boot CD would allow you to see if the drive is accessable.