 | By Fred Langa Adding a hard drive to a Windows PC can be a simple plug-and-play exercise — but sometimes, things go wrong. When your PC doesn’t recognize a new drive, the problem is likely to be in one of three main areas. |
New drive installed, but it doesn’t work
Reader Elvin Cordle’s Windows needs a little more elbow room, so he decided to add a new, larger hard drive to his machine.
- “I originally had two hard drives (80gig and 40gig) installed in my computer, and recently I wanted to update one of the drives to a 160gig. After I made the swap, the computer does not recognize the new drive. All of the drives are parallel ATA.
“I am pretty familiar with computers and have always repaired my computer and several of my friends’ computers. Any help will be appreciated.”
Power. Listen for the drive’s spin-up whir when you turn on the system. If the drive is inert, try using a different power cable. If it won’t spin up at all, even when you use cables that successfully power other components, you have a defective drive.
Configuration. A PATA drive’s electronics must be configured to work properly with other drives in the system. Most PATA-based PCs have two hard-drive controllers, and each controller can usually support one primary (or “master”) drive and one optional secondary (or “slave”) drive. If you have two primary drives on the same controller — or two secondaries — you may run into trouble.
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