Hard drive not found during Vista 64 Premium install..

Hello, I have been struggling with Vista 64 bit premium on my new build and still cannot get Vista to see my hard drive.



Problem: Windows Vista 64-bit OEM will not recognize my SATA hard drive during a clean install on new build.

CPU: Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4
MB: Gigabyte GA-P35 DS3L version 2.0
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KSRTL 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
RAM:CORSAIR 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit
PS: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 EPS12V EPS12V 610W Continuous @ 40°C Power Supply
GC: VGA XFX PVT84JYAJG 8600GT 512M RT
CASE: RAIDMAX|ATX-612WB BK RT


Here is what I have tried:

only installed two gigs of ram for install
Changed SATA cable
Changed port - 4 on MB
Made changes in BIOS - turned on/turned off, set BIOS to defaults, AHCI and NATIVE port 0-1
Fed Intel chipset drivers that I downloaded from MB page when trying to install, did F6 and fed Intel drivers from the Intel download for my chipset
changed jumper to 150mb
I installed a borrowed copy of Xp which worked fine so hard ware is ok.

So my BIOS finds the hard drive fine but Windows Vista 64 will not see the hard drive for me to partition and install.

Thank you in advanced for any help you may be able to offer.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....i=&p_topview=1


http://vistasupport.mvps.org/install...ta_drivers.htm

Thank you for the links. I believe I have been down those roads. My MB is a non raid board but I went to Intel and downloaded the sata chipset drivers as well as the chipset drivers that Gigabyte has listed. I browsed to a flash drive, vista found the drivers and I selected the sata drivers one at a time with no luck. I have the option selected to only list compatible drivers in VISTA.

I guess it is possible I am still not getting the right drivers...:confused: but selected them based on the chipset of the MB.

I have also tried various settings in the BIOS, ahci on/off, Port 0-1 Native on off, combo of the two. I set the BIOS back to default settings with no luck.

I am missing something but I cannot figure this out. I have read others having no problems with vista 64 and this mother board.

Please keep the ideas coming, there has to be an answer to this.
Thank you

SATA AHCI Mode (Intel ICH9 Southbridge) needs to be set as disabled as does SATA Port0-3 Native Mode (Intel ICH9 Southbridge)

HPET mode needs to be set to 64bit

I seem to remember having to go to Intel to get drivers to work on a similar Gigabyte board.

Doing a Google to learn about 'HPET mode' I hit this:

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/i.../30225022.aspx

Helps to explain it a bit.

Well, I have about had it. I guess I could always go buy XP..that seems to work fine and find the harddrive. I pulled the hard drive and installed it today in another system at work and it found it fine and formatted it. I borrowed a friend's copy of XP the installation found the HD in my build. Vista still will not recognize my HD in my build.

I have played with the BIOS settings. I confirmed the BIOS version is F7 which is the newest non-beta version for my board. I don't think there is any point in trying to update the BIOS.

I am lost and tired. My first build and I decided to go for Vista 64 knowing I would probably have issues with drivers but had no idea I would not get past even the install of Windows after 2 weeks.

I have an email in to Western Digital and have been talking to Gigabyte. Everything GB tells me is that there should be no problems and no special setup or drivers needed for Vista to find my HD.

I will post another update later.

Any ideas? Would love to hear the "smoking gun" idea.
Thank you

I forgot to mention I have had the HPET set to 64-bit all along as well as I disabled AHCI and SATA Port 0-1 Native mode with no luck. Thank you for the replies.

Can you just confirm that step 13 here is what we are talking about? You get no recognition of the drive at this point?

Yes, Step 13 from your link is where I am stuck. There is no drives found so I am unable to select or partition one to tell Vista where to install.

Gigabyte tells me VISTA has the driver I need and Western Digital does as well. Despite that, I downloaded the raid chipset drivers from Intel and also the most current chipset drivers from my MB page. I browsed to my flash drive, VISTA found only the drivers that were valid I selected the sata drivers and the others but nothing helped VISTA is still unable to see the HD.

I had posted another post before my last one but still waiting for it to showup in the thread...why are there like a 15 hour delay on my posts to this forum?

OK that's odd, it should still see the disk drive even if it can't drive it. Is the disk already formatted?

Oh and your last question - some posts get shoved in the spam filter holding for a real human to investigate and only a few people can do it, so sometimes it takes a while. Sorry.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Oh and your last question - some posts get shoved in the spam filter holding for a real human to investigate and only a few people can do it, so sometimes it takes a while. Sorry.

---

Thanks for your posts NooNoo.

Ok, was just curious why the delay was happening.


Yesterday I pulled the hard drive and connected it to my work system and had no problem seeing the HD even through a SATA adapter through USB. I then did a format on the drive thinking that might help the process so..

HD is formated, new and working properly.
I am trying a clean install.


Western Digital states that VISTA has the sata driver needed, Gigabyte says the same thing.

Based on my parts listed earlier in the forum can someone give me a specific link to the driver I should use?

I have tried the newest chipset drivers from my MB overview page and the chipset specific drivers from Intel. The process of connecting the flash drive browsing and seeing drivers is working. I actually have been able to choose sata drivers but still no luck.

Thank you and I appreciate the continued posts and help from people.

Maybe I will have to go back and redo things over. From what I have been told the following conditions should be set in the BIOS:

AHCI off
SATA Port0-1 Native off
HPET enabled and set to 64-bit.

Maybe I will try the drivers again in case I have had setting combinations wrong I have been trying everything.

So are you saying that Vista does see the drive at step 13 before you load the driver?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

So are you saying that Vista does see the drive at step 13 before you load the driver?

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No, VISTA never sees the drive but my efforts to provide a driver result in VISTA seeing DRIVERS to choose from when I browse to my flash drive. But selecting any of them whether they be from the INTEL Chipset download or the Chipset I downloaded from Gigabyte still do not fix that there is no drive to install to.

Sorry drive and driver is making it sound confusing.

The point is no drive ever is available for VISTA to install to even after I try to give it a driver at step 13.

OK so on this screen shot, you are saying that when Vista asks you where to install Vista, it has NO disk showing in the central box?

https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2008/03/1.gif

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

OK so on this screen shot, you are saying that when Vista asks you where to install Vista, it has NO disk showing in the central box?

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winv...es/Image17.gif

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That is correct. Even after selecting "Load Drivers" and offering drivers to the process.


My BIOS lists the HD just fine and I can see it in post and setup.

Was the XP you installed 64 bit?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bilbo333

That is correct. Even after selecting "Load Drivers" and offering drivers to the process.


My BIOS lists the HD just fine and I can see it in post and setup.

---

Then no amount of loading drivers is going to change that. There is something very wrong - Vista displays the disk drives that bios detects.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CCT

Was the XP you installed 64 bit?

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No, but yesterday when I pulled the hard drive and connected it to my computer at work, I did a full format. I had thought also that maybe the XP might be interferring with the VISTA now but the drive is clean now well at least it has been formated.


Ok so NooNoo, do you have any spectulation on what could be the issue? I hate the thought of RMA the MB. Maybe I will just get a new hard drive and see how that goes.
Once again thank you for the feedback.

What sort of format did you do?
If it was a format through disk manager, it may not have been good enough.
I personally would zero fill the drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools and then see if Vista can see the blank hard drive.

Does the bios see the drive as primary master? If you have it set correctly, it will be seen as primary master IDE even though it is SATA (assuming you have it set to behave like an IDE drive).

From my reading/studying I find that Vista is more memory sensitive then XP (apparently).

In any case, the ram you bought runs at 2.1 v and your Bios default ram volts is 1.8 v.

http://forum.ncix.com/forums/index.p...d=0#msg1600794

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145034

(which probably has NOTHING to do with your hard drive recognition but may help later )

edit: per your manual; I have reviewed a number of articles and your manual and I get this:

The setting for Sata AHCI Mode (Intel ICH9 Southbridge) has to be in 'Disabled' to switch to Pata (IDE) mode.

The setting for Sata Port 0-1 Native Mode has to be in 'Enabled' to support operation as a Pata drive under XP-2000 no mention of Vista.

The setting Onboard IDE Controller (JMicron 386 Chip) defaults to 'Enabled'.

The setting HPET support (for Vista) defaults to 'Enabled'.

The setting HPET Mode has to be in '64 bit mode' for Vista OS operating at 64.

Could the SATA port the drive is plugged into be bad? Perhaps trying it in another SATA port will help eliminate that as the culprit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Guts3d

Could the SATA port the drive is plugged into be bad? Perhaps trying it in another SATA port will help eliminate that as the culprit.

---

I will try connecting to the other ports again. Maybe in combination, even though I had switched ports before, I may have had the bios settings incorrect.

Also, the suggestion to do a low level format is another option I will try.

Thank you for the info on the ram. I consider that another potential issue although I agree with you that it seems unlikely it would interfere with the function of VISTA. Who knows at this point though, I am ready to try anything.

Well, I am happy to say that I finally had a break through on this issue. Here are the issues that led up to the problem:

Being a new install, I could not use the Western Digital tools disk in my build.
The HD was a SATA and I had no other system or a way to connect the HD to a second system.

THE ANSWER:

After borrowing a sata/usb adapter, I was able to connect the HD to a second system. I installed the Western Digital tools on the second system and created and formatted a partition. That seemed to be the issue. I installed the HD back in my build and ran VISTA which immediately found the bootable partition.

I feel a little stupid that it was a partition that it needed but at this point I am glad it worked.

Thank you to eveyone who posted and offered help. Now I am off to more driver issues that I may encounter.
:)

Vista can find a brand new SATA drive - what you did would tell me that there was something corrupt with the disk mbr or partitions.

Did you zero fill the drive as per my suggestion?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Vista can find a brand new SATA drive - what you did would tell me that there was something corrupt with the disk mbr or partitions.

Did you zero fill the drive as per my suggestion?

---

It may be there was an issue. I did at one point start an xp install but had done a basic format on the HD when I connected to my work computer with the adapter. After doing the basic format VISTA still did not see the HD.

Last night I created a new "bootable" partition and formated that partition with the WD tools. For some reason, VISTA needed that to recognize the drive.

I have always thought a windows install on a new HD did not require anything but there must have been an issue from the XP install I guess?

Did you zero fill the drive?

What did you use to do the "basic format?"

Amazingly enough, I have just finished building one of those and had the exact same problem

2 x 250gb Seagate Barracudas - neither would work. The fix?
Well after finding this mskb and this one and working through the options, none of the fixes worked.

What did fix the problem was unplugging the internal card reader (enlight 27 in 1 in this case) from the usb header on the motherboard.... the card reader installs fine after Vista installs.

I had that same issue when I installed Vista and the way I fixed this was to put the XP cd in and once you get to the point where you can delete the partition delete it and then install Vista with no partition and it would see it. Not sure why but then Vista would see my drives.

Edit: 0 Fill like NooNoo said would work to.

Hello I am also have problems installing vista 64 bit ultimate on a clean build.

CPU: Intel Q9450 Quad Core 2.66
MB: Gigabyte GA-X38 QD6
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAK 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
RAM:UMAX 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit
PS: Earthwatts EA-650
GC: Gigabyte 4850
CASE: Antec Solo
OS: Windows vista 64 Ultimate (Japanese verson)

I have the exact same problem as the person who started this thread. Vista never sees the drive in the vista installation eventhough it is showing it in the Bios. I have also tried the links from this thread and many of the things such as installing sata drivers and trying different settings in the bios like turning on/off AHCI and NATIVE port 0-1 etc.

At the end of this thread there were three different solutions to the same problem. I would like to try to format the drive on another system. What would be the best way? This thread talks about zero filling the drive. How do I do that?

Any assistance or help would be very much appreciated.

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.