Hi!

I have a PC with a SATA hard disk. I wanted to add a second SATA hard disk. From what I had read it was just a case of plugging into the right holes with the right connectors. I thought I could handle that!

However, when I connected the new HDD the computer did not boot up properly.

[Hardware initiate failed please check device press <g> to continue
On pressing <g> …. Disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter.]

The same thing happened when I tried to boot up with just the new disk connected (as I read somewhere you had to do that.)

Disconnect the new disk and reconnect the old and everything is fine again.

I’ve also tried downloading SATA drivers from my mobo website and installing them by F6 during windows setup.

But surely my mobo has drivers for SATA already??

Anyway I’ve read so many things about the problem now I don’t really know who I am anymore. I only wanted to plug the damn thing in!

Please help, and if you need any more info to help me let me know.

You didn't state the model of HD nor Chipset.

Nevertheless, I had similar problem with my sata drive. There is one jumper that sets transferrate of the HD. In my case, it was set on 3Gb/s and Chipset (Nforce4) supports up to 2 Gb/s. The jumper sets it between 1.5 and 3 Gb/s (In my case maxtor 160 Gb).
Didn't work until I've set it on 1.5 Gb/s (which is, BTW, impossible to achive unless we talk double RAID)

Does this make a difference?

Anyway, old HDD is Maxtor 6 YOMO80 80GB. new HDD is
DiamondMax 160GB 8MB Cache SATA OEM HDD Maxtor P/N:6V160E0 http://www.savastore.com/gfx/newsite/x.gif
Chipset is Gigabyte GA-K8VT800(Pro) (does that sound right?)

By name, model and capacity, we have same HD (160 Gb). There is one jumper there I described that is causing the problem.

Hmmm. Thanks Chaky. Having moved the jumper I can now see for the first time the HDD listed in the startup. However, I cannot get the PC to boot up if the new HDD is connected. (I tried windows setup, F6, drivers on floppy, but nogo.)
Any other thoughts?

That is a windows issue with sata drives. I bypassed it in a very strange and annoying way (had to figure out by my self). I sugest the next steps:

Plug in both drives

In BIOS setup disable the new drive (Windows will be able to "see" the drive regardless of this setting)

Disable ANY RAID arrays

Booting should go normal now.

Use Windows disk managment to create the partition on the new drive.

Format the paritition. Have in mind that you will not see a new drive listed in windows explorer until the partition is created.

Now you can reboot and reenable the drive in BIOS setup.

I have have a very similar problem with an ASUS K8V SE DELUXE Mobo and a primary WIN XP bootable WD1600 160GB SATA HD and trying to install a secondary SATA Hitachi HDS722516vlsa80 160GB HD. I know the Hitachi drive has corrupted OS files but tryign to retrieve data from it using the other good drive. When I plug the 2nd in the original functional drive shuts down after the WinXP splash. BIOS detects both drives however. To begin with I didnt use the onboard RAID to try this. When I couldnt get it to work I set up the RAID with the Hitachi on RAID 0 and the WD on Serial ATA 1 (of 2) and it booted into the OS with both HDs connected. The BIOS again detected the 2nd drive, but it does not show up in the OS. Really strange and its driving me nuts and i cant find much documentation to help with this.

Of course I saw your posts above and we tried disabling the 2nd drive and it actually still causes the 1st drive to fail deispite beign disabled.

This is not clear to me. Did you set up RAID array level 0 or by "RAID 0" you ment Serial ATA 0 channel?

If you ment Serial ATA, have in mind that you need to CREATE A PARTITION on a new drive in order to see it in OS.

If you ment RAID array 0... RAID arrays "merge" the drives together, thus making it look like 1 drive with combined capacity.

As I said, XP has problem with most SATA controllers, because the technology in newer than XP.

Sorry I wasnt clear. If you were to look at this particular mobo it has 4 total SATA ports. The first two are basic SATA ports while the others are RAID capable SATA ports and are part of an on board RAID controller. Both the good drive and the corrupted drive have partitions on them and Windows XP installed. A RAID array was never set-up (as 0, 1, 5 etc) as the corrupted drive came from another computer. We are just using this system to somehow pull files off the corrupted SATA drive and save them. I was refering to the physical port number when I said "RAID 0", not the type of array. Essentially, with 4 available SATA ports, we cant find any way to get both drives to appear in the OS.

you seem to have the same mobo as i. i recently installed a 2nd sata drive with the no boot problem. in your case maybe the first 160 gig drive is a sata II drive and the hitachi is sata 1 ??? maybe a jumper required to bring the transfer rate down on the wd drive ?
just a thought