Had a spare bay in my laptop, and put a SATA 160 gig HD in purely for backup. Became apparent that I needed more space, so bought a Seagate 500 gig internal HD as a replacement. First thing I noticed is that the original 160 drive had SATA power, and SATA data connections but NOT the 4 pin connection. The new one did have the 4 pin connection. Only difference. My problem is that when I plug the new drive in, the computer OS doensn't recognize it. Put the old drive back it, no problem.

Running WIN 7 Ultimate, on a Toshiba laptop. can give specs if necessary, but should be plug and play, yeah?

MK

Just curious, have you tried looking in Disk Management to see if the hard drive shows up in there?

Can you give the specs of your new hard drive and your laptop. (Model numbers preferred)

Yeah didn't show up there either,
Model of Laptop is TOSHIBA Satellite P500 PSPGSU-04H00W
HDD is a Seagate ST500LM012

Thanks for the information.

I'm assuming this is how your drive looks like, correct?
Click Here

If so, it looks like those 4 pins are just jumper pins for factory use.
Click Here

So those shouldn't make a difference.

What troubleshooting steps have you done so far?

Have you checked if the drive is actually turning on/spinning?
Have you checked in the BIOS to see if the BIOS recognizes the drive?

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