I just bought a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000AA SATA drive to put in my obsolete Dell Pentium 2.4. My son had given me a Sil 3112 PCI to SATA card and a 120 GB Seagate SATA 7200.7 drive which a few weeks ago I installed with no problem and upon the next boot was recognized as F drive with the OS still running from my 120GB IDE drive. I assumed I could just take out the 120 GB SATA drive and put in the new 400 GB drive. The computer apparently wants to boot off of the WD drive, but of course it can't. when I go through the setup menu and boot from my IDE drive, it doesn't recognize the WD 400 as F or anything. I can see both drives in Device Manager.

Where have I gone wrong?

If you just plugged in the new drive and did nothing else, the BIOS will recognize the existence of a HDD device attached, but the OS will not be able to deal with it until you do two steps: Partition and Format. Partitioning sets up the organization of the disk's space into one or more separately-named "disks" with specified sizes and file organization types. Format (done for each partition separately) does the final setting up of disk access data structures so that the OS can use it.

In Win XP, here are the steps:
1. Make sure you are in an Administrator account on the machine. Click on Start ... Control Panel ... Administrative Tools ... Computer Management.
2. (Now I can see on my home machine; to continue ...) You need to choose Disk Management in the left panel. It will show you, in the right-hand part, an upper and a lower panel. The upper panel lists all the existing drives the OS can handle, and some of their characteistics. Below it in another panel are all the devices attached, including the new hard drive. RIGHT-click on it and be VERY sure by reading its properties that you have chosen the NEW drive, not the old one! WARNING: everything from here on will destroy any old data on the drive, so be VERY sure you are working only with the new one!

3. The pop-up menu will offer you, among other choices, the option to Partition this new drive. Choose that and set it as you wish. For a big drive like this, I'd definitely choose NTFS file system. If you want the entire drive to be one volume, set it that way. If you want to split the unit into two or more logical drives, just set up the first partition to the size you want. After that is done, you can repeat the right-click and choose Partition again, and it will allow you to create another in the unallocated space. I expect you do NOT want any of these partitions to be Bootable - you're already doing that from your IDE drive.

4. Now your drive will have a name (like D: ), or more than one name if you created more than one partition. Again, right-click on a drive with a letter name and choose this time to Format it. Repeat if more than one partition. When done, back out of the Management apps, etc all the way to the desktop. Now open My Computer and your new drive(s) should be there, under My Computer ..., as Local Drive(s). Now you can use them.

But before we get too far, can you confirm what OS you are using so the advice can be most pertinent? Oh, and the Service Pack status is important - Win XP could not handle HDD's over 130 GB in one huge volume when first released - you need to have Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later installed. This can change the procedure slightly. To check this, click on Start ... Control Panel. In it, choose Help ... About Windows, and the second line that talks about the Version will tell you what SP you have.

Paperdoc - I have Windows XP with SP3 on my boot IDE drive. If you have any insight into partitioning looking ahead, within the next 2 months or so, I plan to phase out the old computer and use that WD 400 GB drive in a new build with Vista. Thanks

Great! with XP and SP3 you'll have no problem partitioning the 400 GB unit however you want.

Personally, I've always just partitioned my drives to one huge volume. But there are many who like to do this: make at least two partitions. The first one should be modest size - like, maybe 50 to 100GB - and be the bootable partition. They install the OS on that and maybe a few essentials. Then they make one or more larger paritions in the remaining space and install everything there, including data. The advantage is in recovering from trouble. As far as the OS is concerned, a partition is a completely separate drive. So if things go bad, you can do an OS re-install; in bad cases you can entirely wipe out the smaller first partition with a FORMAT (but NOT a re-partition) operation on that part only, then re-install your OS. All the apps and data on the other partition(s) are still untouched. Then you still need to "re-install" the apps somewhat, so that the newly installed fresh OS can add them to the Registry, but that's supposed to be easy.

If you like this concept, here's what you could do to fit your plans. First, go to the WD website at
http://support.wdc.com/download/
In the left-hand window, select the "2nd Gen. Serial ATA..." and it will show you all the model numbers for that series, including yours, the WD4000AAKS. Now in the right-hand list select the 2nd or 3rd item: "Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2 for DOS (CD)" or the (Floppy) version and download that. See the instructions lower on the screen. They recommend the DOS software for your case (as I'll outline below). The software will make either a CD or a floppy disk you can boot from to run the actual drive setup tools.

My suggestion is that you use this tool to do the initial setup of your 400 GB unit. The menus should offer you the option of creating one partition of specified size (as above) that will have a COMPLETE copy of everything now on your IDE drive, plus be set as a bootable drive. Your could set this up as just one huge 400 GB volume, and it will do all that copying, etc so you just have a much larger copy of your IDE drive. Or you could set this first partition to the size needed to hold everything from the IDE drive with a little spare space. Once that's done you could conceivably replace your IDE drive entirely with the new one, making a small adjustment in your BIOS setup screens to tell the computer which drive to use for booting. But you don't actually want to do that now, anyway.

Now, if you chose to make a smaller boot partition and have unpartitioned space still on the 400GB unit, you go back with the WD Data Lifeguard software and make one or more additional paritions in the unallocated space, but these will NOT be bootable, and they will not need to have copies of the IDE drive in them - they'll just be empty useful space. Along the way, the WD software does BOTH the Partition and Format operations for you, plus any copying, etc.

Once that is all done, your new drive will be completely useable. If your intent is to continue for a while with XP on the IDE drive as your OS and use the new SATA 400 GB drive for storage only, then go ahead and use it. If you chose to create a small separate partition for the copy of the IDE drive, and another for data, I suggest you simply do not use the copied parition of the SATA drive for anything - you're already working with the IDE drive for that. But use the other partition(s) for data.

Later when you upgrade to VISTA, you can re-run the WD software to ensure you make a new complete copy of your old IDE drive on the SATA drive, then swap them around, disconnect the IDE drive and make the SATA drive the only one in your system. Make sure you can boot from it and run normally. Then run your upgrade, which will replace XP with VISTA on the new drive. When it's all done, and you are satisfied that everything works perfectly, you can re-connect the IDE drive, completely wipe it out with a FORMAT operation, and start using it as a data drive. You may have to use the Computer Management ... Disk Management tools to re-assign drive letters so that your boot parition on the 400 GB unit is C:, and other partitions and drives are named as you wish.

The flaw in all this is that your current apps, etc - everything you have, in fact - are on the IDE drive, so they'll end up in the copy partition of the new SATA drive. You lose the advantage of having the OS in a separate partition for trouble recovery. If that is an important advantage to you, you can use your new drive for data only for now. When you start upgrading, you should move ALL data off it, set up some empty partitions, then do a complete fresh install of VISTA on the new drive's smaller bootable partition. Then you re-install all your apps on the other partition(s), and make sure you have all data copied to the new drive. When you're completely satisfied that is all works as it should and you've saved everything, you can format the old IDE drive and use it for data, too.

Hi, this is great info as I'm having a similar problem. I've installed a Seagate 250 GB HD as a slave and the new drive is recognized in the BIOS and Device manager. BUT, it is not listed as an option in the Disk Manager menu where the partitioning and formatting is done. Any thoughts on why this is? I'm running XP SP 2 for the OS. Thanks!!!

MightyOak, take another close look there. In the right-hand lower panel that lists all the connected devices, it is actually a SCROLLING list. If you have several devices (say, a C: drive and a couple for DVD burners, or whatever), the new device will be at the bottom of the list because it does not have a name yet. You'll have to scroll down to see it. I hope it's there!

Thanks, Paperdoc - I wish it was there! I just looked again and I have Disk 0, CD-ROM 1, and CD-ROM 2. No Disk 1 to be found anywhere! It is a Seagate drive and the instructions say to enable Logical Block Addressing in the BIOS, but I don't see that option anywhere in my BIOS options. I'm running a Dell GX150, BIOS version A09. All I can do in my BIOS is set Secondary Drive to 'Auto Detect', which then picks up the Drive's Model number and capacity (250GB). I'm thinking now about upgrading my BIOS (if an upgrade is available). Does this trigger any thoughts / suggestions? Thanks again!

I just looked at some docs on the Dell site for your GX150. They mention two things you should check.
1. It has two EIDE connectors on the mobo, labelled "IDE1" and IDE2". They recommend that you put both the HDD's on IDE1, and both the CD drives on IDE2.
2. On each IDE channel, Master and Slave are to be set by CABLE SELECT. So, on your HDD units, BOTH of them should have jumpers set to the "CS" or "Cable Select" position - NOT to Master or Slave. The the one on the far end of the cable will be the Master, so make sure that's your old drive. The new drive should be on the middle connector on the cable from the IDE1 port on the mobo.
3. Similarly, BOTH of the CD units should have their jumpers set to "CS", etc., and they should be on the IDE2 port.

You could try disconnecting both the CD's for now to see if it will recognize both hard drives enought to get the new one set up. When done (if this works), reconnect the CD's.

Once you get this all working, you may find you don't agree with the letters Windows assigns to the four drives. Right now, I expect you have C: as the old HDD, and D: and E: are the two CD's. If you want to keep those and make the new HDD drive F:, or if you want another arrangement, you can change the drive letters in Disk Manager. Right-click on any working drive and one menu option is to change its drive letter. To make space, temporarily change one unit to a very low letter, like "K:", then change any others to what you want, then go back and change K: to what you really want it to be. For example, you might find Windows has made the new drive F:, but you want it to be D:. So you change the
E: (CD drive) to K:, then D: (CD drive) to E:, then F: (new HDD) to D: as you want, and finally put K: back to F:.

Before doing this, however, think carefully whether you have software installed that already depends on having your two CD drives labelled as they are now. If so, you might want to leave them that way and make the new HDD into F:. Otherwise you may have to reconfigure the software apps to find the CD's under new names.