I must be missing something obvious here… I’m attempting to attach my old hard drive to a new PC, yet the new one refuses to recognize the drive. Both are WinXP formatted, the older is a 120gig Seagate. The current motherboard is an ASUS M2N32-SLI DLX WIFI AM2. I’ve hooked up the old drive to the power supply and the motherboard, and it heats up when the computer is turned on (no idea if that means anything).
From the research I’ve done, everything points to needing new drivers, yet Seagate states their drive does not require additional drivers, and on the ASUS site they only have Vista drivers when I look in the SATA section. Having never updated BIOS myself, I’m a bit weary in downloading new BIOS drivers. Am I just being over-cautions, or is there something I need to know before updating the BIOS? And will updating the BIOS even help in the computer recognizing the new HD I plugged into it?
Hardcore Casual 
IDE or SATA drive?
Have you checked the slave/master settings on the back of the drive? Might need a jumper moving to some diff pins perhaps..
120GB|SEAGAT ST3120026AS SATA .
I thought only older HD dealt with jumpers? The broken comp was only 4 years old, the one I’m trying to get it to work on is about a year old.
Yeah it does, sorry.. missed the sata part in your post.
Not sure what to suggest, Im not up to speed with Vista stuff yet.. left XP on my box till I absolutly have to upgrade it
Can you check your BIOS with both drives plugged in and see if the BIOS sees both drives? If it does I would assume its either a Vista thing or something wrong with the HD.
Try removing the newest drive altogether and booting from your old one if it has windows installed to it perhaps.
Well I have XP installed on both drives, sorry if that was not clear before.
If I unplug the current drive, and only plug in the old one, the comp says there is no boot disk and asks for one, so clearly it’s not picking up the HD. When I check BIOS, the only HD that comes up is the current one, not the one I’m trying to plug in.
Odd.. perhaps the filetable/partition on the old drive has corrupted?
I had a 250gb HD that did something similar, asking for a boot disk and wouldnt load. When I hooked it up to a second PC windows at least recognised it, even if it did say it was an unformatted drive.
I managed to get some HD recovery tool from the net and checked the drive only to find the data still on it. Seems something had corrupted along the way stopping windows recognising it iirc
Might be worth grabbing a trial to something and running a scan on the old drive from xp on the new one if that makes sense. My experience is limited to IDE drives with probs though, never had a SATA die on me yet so appologies if this info is no good.
Well stupid XP won’t even recognize the drive, so I can’t run any recovery on it sadly.
Anyone else have any suggestions?
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
You can rule out the OS. You should be able to see it in the BIOS. If your not seeing it there, then an OS most likely isn’t going to see it, and it could be a hardware problem.
After reading the comments here only other thing I would suggest would be to remove the battery from your motherboard to reset the CMOS possibly there is a disconnect somewhere…power supply to the other HD is working I assume…hope you get it worked out, I know how frustrating it can be when you can’t get stuff to work.
Did you change your BIOS setting to pick up the new drive, or did you leave it configured for the old drive?
Well the BIOS should at least SEE the drive when I have it plugged in, right? Or do you actually need to do something in the BIOS before you even plug it in?
depends on your bios, but some are picky about how you have the drives configured in respect to Primary/Secondary and Master/Slave. With Sata drives, I think this is determined by which part of the cable you use to connect the drives. Try swapping plugs and make sure that the drive letters/boot sequence in the bios matches the plugs you’re using for each drive.
Did you check the connector in the back? Sata cables suck, they will break the connection in the back when you least expect it. Did you try a HD enclosure? Did you neutralize the drive beforehand? Via to Nforce chipset can cause boot problems. Good luck, I hate problems like these. hehe.
The cables seem ok. They are surprisingly loose, especially the power cable. But if the drive heats up, it must mean it has power, right?
No idea about the HD enclosure, or about neutralizing it…
I don’t know if you fixed this by now or not, but just in case: It almost certainly sounds like a Jumper problem.