I ordered a new WD5000AAKS drive to replace what I thought was a old drive that was failing before I realized the old drive’s firmware was out of date and could still be useful. After getting the new drive, I used both drives in RAID 0 and installed Win 7 Pro and it ran well for about 4-5 days before running into RAID errors, crashes, and other problems.
I decided to just use the new WD drive with Win 7. I disabled RAID in my BIOS, set the new WD drive as 1st hard drive boot, and booted to the Win 7 disk. The new WD drive does show up in BIOS. When I got to the Win 7 install screen for drives. The new WD drive was not listed. I changed data cables, moved the data cable from one SATA connection to another, and changed out power connections. No matter what I did, the drive would not show up as a drive to install Windows on. I reconnected the old drive and it did show up in the Windows install. I know the new WD drive has to work because it was setup in RAID and is now currently that way with obvious errors probably due to old drive. Not sure what’s going on to not have the new WD drive not show up as a install device even when it is visible in BIOS.
