G50 Installing Second Hard Drive Help!

Hi,
I decided to add an extra hard drive to the empty slot of my computer. It was originally configured with a 200GB drive, and I added an 80GB drive. Unfortunately, I can't get Vista to see it. I took at look at the Bios settings, and everything seems normal. The 80GB drive is present and recognized. However, when I boot into Vista, the disk managment utility won't find it. Can someone tell me if I'm missing a setting?

Thanks
Gabe

 

That's a tough one. If it shows up in the BIOS and the first drive boots into Vista fine, it wouldn't seem like a jumper issue, though it might be worth checking just to be sure. The second drive should be set as the slave, obviously.

If that proves fruitless, consider trying to format it with your Vista disc. Boot off your Vista CD, then at the partition table create and format a partition on the second drive, after that completes just remove the CD and reboot. If the drive doesn't show up there either it would seem like there has to be a hardware configuration problem. If you can get the drive partitioned and formatted for NTFS it should show up in Vista once you boot back up.

 

I'm thinking it may be another issue. This 80GB drive is brand new, and although I had previously installed vista on it, it should still recognize and intialize within the computer. Also, it was causing the system to boot rather oddly. It would show the asus splash screen, pause, restart (showing the splash screen again), and then continue into windows. Also, if I tried to put the Vista disc in and boot from it, it wouldn't (DVD drive physically missing from the boot menu you get when you hit esc and changing the boot order within the bios wouldn't work either). Since then, I've removed the drive and gone back to a single setup. However, my direct console is now acting up again. It's opening itself on boot, and it didn't before.

Gabe

 

That is some strange behavior, and you may well be right that it's unrelated to the drive. Still, if it was previously the primary drive of another Vista system, perhaps some residual aspect of that OS install is causing conflict? What happens if you pull your primary drive, leaving the second drive in, and try to boot from the Vista disc? Maybe wiping the drive completely clean would help Vista to see it.

 

Given that G50 supports RAID, don't you have to explicitly configure the RAID mode in BIOS once you connect the 2nd HDD? Even if it's just disabling RAID altogether.

The fact that the ODD disappears from the boot menu indeed suggests conflicts between the ODD and the new HDD. I'm not sure how the Master/Slave thing works with SATA (HDD is SATA and the ODD is ATA probably)...

 

Well if it is a new drive first thing I would do is format it, disk managment should be picking it up no matter what but may as well take the original drive out, put the new one in its place and then use a recover disk or boot disk to format the drive so you eliminate any conflicts.

You have to be talking about the best buy model that comes with only 1 HDD, so I have no idea what mode the bios is set for, the A1 came with Sata mode "enhanced" (if I am not mistaken thats bios talk for AHCI) while most computer would be setup for "IDE Mode" so formating the disk would make that conflict go away.

Maybe its possible that you can not use 2 disks in the X1 model too since they did sell it with only 1 drive maybe they have it blocked off on a hardware level.

 

Hi,
I just wanted to give everyone and update about my 2nd hard drive issues. Currently, I have tried every hard drive mode and formating option available. It will not use the 2nd drive as an independent drive no matter what you do. Raid is possible, but that's about as far as it goes. The POST issues continue (splash screen restarts once and boot list is missing optical drive) until you switch to raid. Based on my testing, I can safely assume that it's not possible to run this computer in any configuration other than a single drive or raid.

Gabe

P.S. - Drives were tested with enclosures (within windows) to make sure the drives didn't DOA on me.

 

Not true. I have a 200 and 120 drive in my system, which is an X1.

 

I am not sure what the case is for this... what model/brand is the HDD you are adding to your system?

I added a WD 120gb 5400rpm drive to mine, and didnt touch a single setting in the BIOS and it worked flawlessly in Vista.

I am not running RAID, just two disks.