Hi, I'm at a total loss here. I've got three identical 400GB SATA hard drives. (Western Digital WD4000YR) I've got them in identical, external USB cases. They were working fine until recently when suddenly, without warning, Windows XP stopped reading them. I've plugged them into my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500) and desktop (Dell Dimension 8200) USB ports. Nothing. The desktop doesn't have SATA ports on the motherboard. So I purchased a PCI card that gives me SATA connectors. I opened the external cases of the drives and connected them to the PCI card. Nothing but problems. Typically WinXP just locks up if I have any of the drives connected to the PCI card. So I purchased a PCMCIA card for my laptop with two SATA ports. No matter what I do, I cannot get WinXP to even recognize there is a hard drive attached. The Disk Management console just doesn't show anything. As far as I can tell from sight and sound, the drives are still functioning okay. No weird noises, and it sounds like the drive spin up and all that. I just can't get Windows to detect the drives! Any ideas? Thank you so much for your help.
UPDATE: Here's something interesting. One of the three drives works just fine now when connected via USB in the external case. I can access all my data and everything is okay. However, the same drive will not be detected by Win XP if I connect the SATA cable to the PCMCIA card in my laptop! Therefore, something is wrong either with the card (brand new), the SATA cable (also brand new), or something else... I have zero experience with SATA hard drives prior to this, so any help is appreciated. How do I get the SATA PCMCIA card thing working so my laptop will read the hard drives that way? There is a driver install disk for the PCMCIA card but when I run the "update driver" wizard, WinXP tells me I already have the latest drivers so I don't need to update them. Thanks for your help!
Hi, I have a similar problem. I also have a dual SATA PCMCIA card but with a Inspiron 9300 and it would not identify a brand new 320GB SATA 300, tried jumper settings etc. nothing, and when I tried to run admin tools the control panel crashes. Then when I try to turn off the machine it hangs on shut down. Instead, to eliminate possible causes, I plugged it directly into my desktop PC instead, also would not see it but I was able to open disk manager and format. Created three partitions and plugged back into laptop using PCMCIA. Machine sees two of the three partitions but control panel still crashes when I try to access admin tools. Less than ideal. Any tips would be helpful as I don't have time to dig for solutions. Cheers.
OK so I have just tried something else, turned machine on without PCMCIA installed, clicked to 'disk management', popped in the card, turned on the drive, all three partitons now show. Checked 'my computer' and all three list there also, tried clicking through to 'disk management' again with no problems, created a short-cut on desk top just in case. Restarting computer now with drive turned on. Check 'my computer' all three drives are showing and click through to 'disk management' working fine. ??????? I have no idea why any of the earlier problems arose or why they are now inexplicably absent, then again I'm not a computer expert!
ddp - thanks for the suggestion. I connected a working drive to the SATA PCI card and it came right up, no problem. The other two drives are still unrecognized by Windows, however. One of the bad drives freezes up my system. As soon as I connect it to the SATA PCI card, Windows will lock up for about twenty seconds, then unfreeze for a bit, then lock up again, and repeat. But the drive is never recognized. The other drive simply does nothing. It's as though it's not connected at all. Both drives sound like they spin up okay... I'm at a total loss here. Any more suggestions?
