Posts Tagged ‘hard drives’

I came to access the data partion of my hard drive yesterday and received a message informing me that my E: drive was not formatted and would I like to format it now?

Awwww, crap.

Having tried all the usual solutions I installed Partition Table Magic (having shelled out quite a bit for it) to fix everything. Which it didn’t. It did however mess with my partion table so that instead of booting off my main partition it now booted off the small media partition that you can use to play movies and such without booting up the full operating system.

So now I couldn’t get Windows to boot at all.

I downloaded GParted and booted into that with the LiveCD and managed to reset the flag so that it booted off the proper partition. But now the media center partition is visible for the first time and who knows what other damage has been done.

Still, I’ve got past the heart wrenching hours where I thought I was going to have to shell out for professional data recovery so things could be worse.

SATA or Serial ATA is what most hard drives are moving towards these days. While the technical details differ them from the traditional IDE drives the main thing you need to know is that they have smaller cables and so are a lot less fiddly.

Other than the cable going to a different point though it’s much like installing an IDE hard drive. Once you’ve grounded yourself you want to slot the hard drive into a drive bay and screw it in place.

Secondly find a spare power cable running from the power unit and connect that to the back of the hard drive.

Finally you need to connect your SATA cable. SATA cables are small and thin with little flat connectors at the end. Connect one end to the bottom of your hard drive and the other end goes directly onto your motherboard. These vary in location depending on your motherboard so have a check around.

Once it’s in, put everything back together and boot your computer up. If the computer doesn’t recognise it you may need to get software from your hardware manufacturer to pick it up (though it should pick it up automatically).