I ordered a new hard drive for Jen's computer last weekend from NewEgg. It was the Samsung HD502HI (500GB) which I thought was a pretty good price for that size of a drive. At the time I ordered it I didn't really pay attention the SATA speed and that it was 3.0 while Jen's older Dell Dimension 3100 only had a 1.5 SATA chipset on it. No big deal though because I figured the spec had to be backwards compatable.....which it is supposed to be.
Well it wasn't doing a very good job of being backwards compatable. I installed it into her computer today and although I saw it in the BIOS just fine I couldn't find it in windows XP at all. I eventually found it in the Disk Manager under Computer Management but it wasn't intialized. No big deal I thought so initialized it, partitioned it and then formated it.
By the way formatting a 500gb hard drive takes some time....
Anyways when it was done I rebooted and *poof* it was gone. I did some digging and found a similar person having issues with samsung drives and tried some of the same steps he did with no apparent luck. Sure the Estools boot CD I created said that it set the bandwidth to 1.5 but windows still wouldn't see it.
As a last ditch effort I flashed her BIOS from A03 to A04 (last release from Dell) and so far it seems to have done the trick. The real answer probably lies somewhere between manually setting the drive to 1.5 mode and the bios update, but for now all I care about is it's working so now I can clone her OS over to it.
Thank you so much for this! I struggled for hours (literately) trying to install my Samsung HD502HI (500GB) external hard drive to my computer's usb. You saved me even more frustration and time. Thankfully I didn't need to do the bios...just the computer management part.
Thanks!!!!!