Secondary SATA drive not recognised

[Pyrus]

I bought a Seagate 2Tb internal 3.5 inch drive intending to install it in my desktop as a secondary drive. The desktop currently has two 500Gb disks in a Raid 0 (striped) array. One SATA port is free and I connected the new disk to this. The system did not recognise the disk so I put it in a caddy to check it. The disk was recognised over the Caddy's USB connection and I took the opportunity to format it NTFS.

I put the newly formatted (and empty) disk back into the desktop for a second attempt.

Results as follows.

Disk Management does not show the new disk:



But Device Manager shows the new disk as ST2000M001-1CH164:



The ST2000M001-1CH164 entry disappears and reappears when I detach and reattach the SATA cable, proving the disk is powering up and the SATA connection is OK.

Although ST2000M001-1CH164 shows up in Device Manager all is not well. First, here is the detail for the (working) C drive:



And here are the details for the new drive:



- Notice one panel says no drivers are installed, another says the disk has the same drivers as the working disk. I tried clicking Update Drivers but it comes back and says they are already up to date. I tried Disable/Enable but that didn’t do anything.

I tried Seagate’s Seatools utility but couldn’t get anything meaningful from it:



I tried the BIOS next. The new disc shows under the Boot tab:

Hard Disk Drives
1st Drive [RAID: Intel Volume 0]
2nd Drive [RAID: ST2000DM001-1]

I don’t like the way it has ‘RAID’ against the new disk, but when I cntl-i to show the RAID settings the new disk correctly shows as non-RAID:



Any advice where to go from here? If I can’t get the disk working internally I’ll run it from a caddy under USB but that’s not really what I want!

 

[Sub Styler]

It shows it as RAID because the whole contoller is in RAID mode, however non member disks are supported normally in this mode. Have you installed the latest ICH10R driver for your version of windows from the intel website? This may iron out compatibility issue with mixed mode drives on the controler. It's not quite the same as the F6 setup driver or the built in windows driver.

 

[Pyrus]

Thanks for the explanation why BIOS shows RAID on a non-RAID disk Sub Styler. I'm not sure about ICH10R though. intel.co.uk has six entries for ICH10R download and none of them mention Windows 7:



Also, a search for ICH10R on the computer brings back nothing.

 

[Pyrus]

Something else I should mention: the BIOS has stopped listing the SATA ports. They should appear on the Main screen between Language and Storage Configuration, as six lines Sata1 thru 6. They were there a couple of days ago but they have disappeared. I have been in and out of the BIOS numerous times but I can't restore them.

 

[Sub Styler]

I dont have them listed when in RAID mode, only in IDE or AHCI mode. The vista version of the driver will work just fine.

 

[Pyrus]

I'm still nervous about ICH10R. I've just noticed that of the items returned from a search on intel.co.uk only one is a download of ICH10R itself, all the others are returned because ICH10R is mentioned somewhere in the description. And the one and only purely ICH10R download is only intended for server versions of Windows.

But I have had another idea. I found some roughly comparable threads on Tom's Hardware, and on one or two of them people were advised to set up the secondary disk as a 'single disk RAID (0) array'. Example:

New hdd shows up in bios but not in disk management - Hard Drives - Storage

This sounds odd. Like going into a bike shop and asking for a one-man tandem. But if someone can confirm it makes sense I'll give it a go. I presume it's something I'd do under cntl-i at startup.

 

[Sub Styler]

I dont think the onboard intel controller will allow a single disk array. But you are welcome to try it. Have you got an alternative controller to connect it to? eg, into a different sata port onboard.

 

[Pyrus]

Apologies for delayed reply. I attempted setting up the new disk as a one-disk RAID array and as predicted by Sub Styler it wouldn't let me. It came up with a message something like 'Error: insufficient space available to create RAID volume'. As for using another SATA port, the only free one is somewhere behind the graphics card and removing (and replacing ) graphics cards is beyond my skill level. So I'm abandoning the attempt to get this disk working as a secondary drive and falling back on the USB enclosure option.