Hard drive not found during Vista 64 Premium install..

Find a system with Vista and sata.
Shutdown plug the drive into the system and boot up.
Right click My Computer and go to "Manage".
The left side disk management.
Initialize the drive and partition it

Thanks a lot Ferrit. I'm new to vista so I didn't know how easy it would be.
:thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs:
Actually I solved the problem before I received your post.
If there are any other people out there who are having problems with vista recognizing their drive and it is a WD drive you can download a program from Western Digital called Data lifeguard diagnostics. You can download it here.

Once you've downloaded it, run it and it will create a boot disk that you can use to run the program.

I created the boot disk on my old computer and then physically took it out of that computer and installed it into my new computer. It was a little messy but it worked.

The program has some tools and you can zero format the drive. Once it was done the drive had know problem being recognized by vista.

Thought I'd mention this solution as I bet there will be other people out there with the same problem and the information for Microsoft and Western digital was not helpful. :uke:

Cheers

I had the identical problem.
Solution:
1)Pulled my new Maxtor HD and put it in my old machine running XP Pro 32 as a non-booting back-up drive.
Sidenote:Tried to partition it with the software that came in the box with the drive, but the program hung up several times. A 64bit machine was not necessary.
2)Went to Maxtor site and downloaded the lastest version of their partition utility.
3)Partitioned the drive on my old 32bit machine.
4)Put the drive back in the new machine and installed Vista Home Premium 64.

Thanks everyone who posted here for helping to solve my VERY frustrating problem that stumped me for 2 days.

Michael:thumbs:

Glad to hear it's all sorted Mike.

I had the same problem. I started with two Seagate 1.5's in a striped RAID on an eVGA nForce 750i SLi FTW. XP32 won't see them, XP64 crashes before starting installer, and Vista Home Premium 64 says there are no drives. I tried installing the Vista64 driver right from the CD that came with the motherboard, and it still says no drives. It doesn't seem to matter if I have the drives in an array or not. Windows just refuses to acknowledge their existence.

Linux (openSUSE, Fedora) sees them fine either as /dev/sd* or as an array under /dev/mapper/nvidia* and even properly installs the boot loader. FreeBSD sees the drives and -probably- sees the array, but I don't know what BSD does with it. (-:

The real kicker is that Windows 98 sees it all. It can even partition the whole array (using the "allocate it all and make it bootable" option), format it (though it says it's like an 80MB drive, and install to it. (After that it sees it as a -1TB drive, because it's reading the volume size as a signed integer instead of unsigned, but it seems to work fine.) Well, anyway, that seems to be one way to solve the partitioning problem...heh.

Thanks to those on this forum who already pulled their hair out trying to figure this one out. You saved me from a lot of guesswork and hardware returns. :thumbs:

Welcome to Windrivers BenVanderjagt

Glad this helped... what fixed it for you? Booting from a win98cd?

(I've been working on computers since the mid 80's, and I gotta say I love your sig, NooNoo. I ought to put that on the doorway to my shop!)

Win98 properly detects the the SATA drives individually -or- as a RAID if I set the RAID BIOS up that way. I could then fdisk it from there. Once it was partitioned, Vista magically saw the drives.

I should add an update, though. It seems that this motherboard simply blows. Once Vista finishes installing, it refuses to boot (softlock). I can "solve" the problem by having only exactly the two hard drives on any SATA controller, but since it has a blu-ray burner and a blu-ray drive, and I can't get those in IDE, I'm sorta stuck. It seems that once the install finishes, the RAID BIOS starts desperately trying (for upwards of 10 minutes after POST) to add the BD drives to the array! I installed an updated firmware, and now the system intermittently boots, randomly detects non-existent (or refuses to detect existing) IDE CD-ROM drives on the SATA controller.

It seems to be entirely a flaw in the RAID BIOS, because if I disable it everything works perfectly. (But of course, since my client wants RAID-0 for Windows, and since he doesn't want split partitions to do it, I probably can't continue with this board.)

GRUB seems to work fine with this BIOS, and it may be possible to complete Vista's initial installation, install Linux, and then boot to Windows to continue. That takes a lot of time, and it probably won't work, but I'll post an update with my results when I can. If it were for me, I would just stick with Linux and be happy with the board. /-:

Again, thanks! It seems I'll still be pulling my hair out and probably returning hardware, but at least this simplified things.

Hmmm I would be looking for a bios update....

As I mentioned, I did, though I vaguely referred to it as firmware. /-: It has made things worse, since now it only intermittently boots, sometimes claiming it doesn't see the video card, and other times claiming that the CPU wasn't detected. *sigh*

Oddly, I found a replacement board that will do everything I want. And it's an ASRock, of all things! But it will see 4 x 4GB sticks, supports SLi -or- CrossFire (weird, huh?), and has better reviews. Oh well, guess I'll be waiting for that board before continuing.

So what board is currently giving you grief? Asrock are pretty solid for a budget board.

Oh, indeed! I've built hundreds of systems with ASRock boards, and they always work great. (Their "Solid ASRock" is kinda corny, tho.) One thing I've learned is that there is an inverse correlation between motherboard price and quality. I've never had a high-end motherboard that didn't have some really annoying problem or serious dealbreaker.

The board I was working with, which I have just returned, was an eVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW. I think it should have been called "eVGA nForce 750i LOL WTF?"

Customer decided not to go the SLI route, which I agree with since I think video card manufacturers are going to put more focus into putting lots of GPU's on single cards, much in the way that multi-socket motherboards are being largely displaced by multi-core CPU's. That in mind, he's going with an ASUS P5Q SE2 for its 16GB support and 6 SATA's. If I have trouble with this one, which I rarely have trouble with Intel-based ASUS boards, I'll be sure to post it on this thread if it applies to the topic of the thread.

If everything works and I don't return, then I send one last Thank You. (=

Finding a bios update for an evga board is something to behold There doesn't appear to be a fix for your problem... but we all know how good manufacturers are at not describing all the fixes in the bios update. A quick look around shows that the raid seems to work ok for most people, so maybe you had a lemon.

Hehe, I noticed that. Thanks for the link. It was an enjoyable read. :-D

Well, when I returned the board, instead of marketing it as one of the greatest boards they carry and offering to replace it with another, they said that the nForce series chips shouldn't have been paired with Intel processors and that they've been flakey. I don't know how much of that was their true opinion and how much was sycophancy.

(BTW, I haven't yet built up the ASUS board. I'm in Virginia, USA, and we had some really crazy wind knocking out power lines, and since then my server has been randomly rebooting, so that's taking up all of my time.)

Post again if you need anything else - and get a ups for that server!

I'm having some similar trouble with installing vista. I'm doing a clean install, and when I go to install it my drive doesn't show up. I have downloaded all the proper drivers to a flash drive, but unfortunately they aren't recognized in the install screen. In my POST screen, it freezes at "Verifying DMI Pool Data" I'm not sure if this is related. Please Help!!