I own an Advent T9101 and i wanted to get some more space. I was advised at Maplins that I could get a 1TB hard drive (which was on offer) and run it via the USB port.

So I bought a HITACHI 1TB hard drive HDT721010SLA360 - 1TB SATA 3.0GH,S HITACHI 0A38016 7200RPM 16MB
and a nikkai usb 2.0 to sata and ide hard disk adaptor (so that you can plug a hard drive in via USB and it would recognise it)

Well I tried it and my computer will not recognise the Hitachi 1TB Sata hard drive (it has worked with a Maxtor 200GB Ide hard drive)

please any advice would be welcome to get this working

will my pc recognise a drive of this size?
could i get a PCI card with sata slots to run it? I have 1 slot left
should i go for a docking station?

any ideas please

Cheers Dave

Since you are connecting it via USB, it is not a motherboard issue so your PC is irrelevant. Assuming that we are talking about XP or Vista, Windows should have no difficulty with a 1Tb drive.

I often use these USB to IDE/SATA adapters when I'm working on hard drives and whilst they are good when they work, they sometimes can be a bit hit and miss on detection. I find that the best strategy is to get the PC fully up and running, then connect the power to the hard drive and hear that spin up and then only at that point plug the USB lead into the PC (obviously the adapter should be connected to the hard drive before you power the hard drive).

Usually it then goes through the routine of installing the adapter and then the HD drive drivers and you're away. Sometimes however nothing happens and I have known it take three times round the loop before it works. Once it IS installed, it is then usually fine every time.

The only thing that I would say about the adapter though is if it is like mine, it means that the drive is bare. That is OK because I'm only doing it to rebuild a drive but I wouldn't fancy that for a long term situation. I'd want the drive in a case. Or one of the other approaches that you mention.

Thanks for your speedy response Grasshopper

Since I had no joy yesterday with the adapter and thinking about the chances of the kids messing about with a temporary bare hard drive sat on my pc, so I've gone and bought a PCI SATA RAID Card - http://www.hltechnology.com/one_prod.php?pid=2647

thinking this would resolve the problem but my computer still will not recognise it in "My Computer" I have made sure it is seated properley in PCI slot and have changed it to another PCI slot, it is showing up in Control Panel as ahard drive and the PCI sata card is recognised, I have installed the drivers (I installed Non-raid drivers- not 100% about that instructions were not good with card)
I've tried to get to the bios but when the pc is turned on it goes straight to "Press F4 to Set RAID" option - i've tried disabling the card as i thought the BIOS might pop up but it hasn't. So I'm STUCK!!!

hard drive btw is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822145233
I'm running Windows XP sp3

Help any advice greatly appreciated
Cheers Dave

My spec is:-
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/advent/pc/t9101.htm

CPU Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz HT
BIOS Phoenix-Award BIOS. Press the DEL key to enter
Motherboard MSI MS-7060
Memory 512 MB DDR RAM - PC3200
Hard Drive 200GB Seagate ST3200021A
CD Drive Sony DW-U18A DVDRW
Floppy Drive Floppy disk drive fitted
Video Card SiS 661FX
Sound Card Realtek AC'97 audio
Modem Creatix V.9x DSP Data Fax Modem
Network Card SiS 900 integrated fast ethernet
Ports (Front) 1x Headphone
1x Microphone
1x Line-in
1x Audio Input (Left)
1x Audio Input (Right)
2x IEEE 1394 (FireWire)
3x USB 2.0
Ports (Rear) 1x PS/2 Mouse
1x PS/2 Keyboard
1x Parallel
1x Serial
1x VGA
1x IEEE 1394 (FireWire)
4x USB 2.0
1x LAN
1x Line-in
1x Line-out
1x Microphone
1x Modem
Keyboard Advent PS/2 keyboard
Mouse Advent PS/2 mouse


Case Disassembly

Release the side of the case by removing the 2 screws on the right hand side at the back, then slide the side of the case backwards. The panel is a tight fit and may require firm pressure to remove. The front bezel has to be removed before the drives can be slid out. It is retained by 4 clips.



Drivers

Your PC should have a backup copy of all the drivers, you can find it by browsing to the c:\applications\drivers folder. If this folder is missing then you can get most of them from The Tech Guys website.



Motherboard Information
CPU: Socket 478 for P4 Celeron/Celeron D(FSB 400/533 Mhz)/Northwood/Prescott CPUs with FSB400/533/800MHz up to 3.4GHz
Main Memory:
Supports two memory banks using two 184-pin unbuffered DDR DIMMs
Supports up to 2GB memory size without ECC
Supports DDR266/333/400
Chipset: SiS 661FX
Supports Intel Pentium 4 processors with data transfer rate up to 800MHz
Supports 64-bit high performance DDR400/DDR333/DDR266 memory controller
Supports high performance & high quality 3D Graphic Accelerator
Supports AGP 8x/4x interface
Supports bi-directional 16-bit data bus with 1GHz bandwidth
Slots:
One 8x/4x AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) universal slot
Three PCI 2.2 32-bit Master PCI Bus slots
On-Board IDE:
Dual IDE controllers integrated in SiS® 964L
Support Bus Master, Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 operation modes
On-Board Peripherals:
1 floppy port supports 2 FDDs with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88Mbytes
1 serial port
1 VGA port
1 PS2 keyboard + 1 PS2 mouse connectors
1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
7 high speed USB 2.0/1.1 ports (Rear * 4 / Front * 3)
1 audio (Line-In/Line-Out/Mic-In) port
1 RJ-45 LAN connector
2 IEEE 1394 ports (Real * 1/ Front * 1 with pinheader) (Optional)

Thanks again

hi, another suggestion could be that the drive is probably SATA II and your motherboard may only be able to detect SATA I drives. If this is the case there should be some pins on the back of the drive to jumper it from SATA II to SATA I.

Smurf

I'm just wondering - you said it showed in Control Panel but not My Computer. I suppose you have formatted it and assigned it a drive letter?

I managed to do a low level format from the F4 RAID menu on boot up.

I've attached a screen shot of device manager and my computer and a pic of the back of the hard drive - I've tried a jumper on the two pins but still nothing showed up.

http://s812.photobucket.com/albums/zz48/pl...screenshot1.jpg
http://s812.photobucket.com/albums/zz48/pl...nt=DSC03048.jpg
http://s812.photobucket.com/albums/zz48/pl...nt=DSC03049.jpg

Any ideas?

Thanks for all your help so far.

Dave

Low Level Format????????????? No hard drive has required a low level format by a user for the last 10 years or more. They are LLF'd at the factory for life. And because of the complex structure of a modern drive, I doubt that any utility with the RAID card could do it. It might possibly reinitialise it i.e. restore it to factory settings but that would be all.

What I was asking about was High Level Formatting i.e. setting up the file structure.

Have you been to:

Control Panel>Admin Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management

There you need to initialise the disk and then format to create a partition(s) and drive letters. Without that, it will never show in My Computer.

lol - cheers mate i forgot all about that cos I've always had drives installed already or second hand drives already formatted - cheers seems to be working fine

Ive had a crack at partitioning too - gotta start somewhere i guess being a newbie

thanks for all your advice much appreciated

cheers Dave