I have had the Samsung 80GB SP0812C Serial Hard drive connected to a SATA Card, and my Windows XP can not recognize it. I have another harddrive but it is about full and I find that i am needing this hard drive. Can anyone walk me through how to get it started. I'm not sure which drivers I have. I don't have any discs for it or anything.

I have used it before, it used to be my main drive before I bought this new one.

It's most likely that Windows doesn't have a driver for the SATA card installed.

Open up the Device Manager by clicking Start, Control Panel and System, then clicking on the Hardware tab and the Device Manager button. If you can't find System in the control panel, it is probably in Category view; switch to Classic view by clicking it on the left.

Check if there are any devices with yellow question marks or red crosses. If you have a device with a name like "Storage Controller", "SATA Controller", "SCSI Controller" or something similar with a yellow question mark next to it, you need to install a device driver.

If you need to install a driver, follow these steps. otherwise, skip bellow.

You will need the disc that should have been supplied with the hardware. Insert it and wait for a few seconds. If you it has an auto-run, there may be an automatic driver installation program. If this is the case, use that.

If it doesn't, or you don't have a disc, we can try updating it manually. Right click on the device and select Update Driver.... If you're running Service Pack 2 (Highly recommended, and necessary if you don't have the disc), the first message will ask you if you want to try searching Windows Update for the software. Select Yes, this time only, and Next. When asked What do you want the wizard to do?, select Install the software automatically and Next. This may take a few minutes, but hopefully will install a driver. You may need to reboot afterwards.

If you already have the driver installed and the drive is still not detected, try following these steps:

Open up the Logical Disk Manager, otherwise known as Disk Management. The fastest way to do this is click Start, Run and type diskmgmt.msc. You may be prompted straight away to Initialize a disk, if so, continue through the procedure, but if asked to convert the volume, do not.
The logical disk manager lists all formatted volumes in colour, and unallocated space in black, like this.



If any are listed as Unallocated, in black, right click and select New Partition…
The wizard will guide you through creating a new partition and formatting it. When you are prompted to Format, click on the Perform a quick format checkbox.


If none of this was any help, post back.