WD1001FALS not found by Windows

Hi everyone,

I put a WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s HDD in a new PC that I just built. The PC turns on fine, but in BIOS, it lists my HDD as a slave no matter what  SATA port I plug it in to. When I try to install Windows 7, I get to the point where it asks “Where do you want to install Windows?” and it says “No drives were found”. Then I click on “Search for drivers” (it may have been worded silghtly differently) and it shows a “Local Disk: C” but if I click on it it says that I need to configure it; if I click on the link to configure it, it says the disk cannot be accessed, and to please install the drivers and insure that it is not read-only. 

Does anyone know what the problem could be?

Thanks in advance!!!

EDIT: My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3

sata doesnt have the same master/slave configuration as traditional IDE chipsets

now, that being said, your bios might be configured to show the sata drives as IDE devices.

have you tried changing the chipset, that the drive is plugged into, from IDE to AHCI or vise versa?

 specs for the GA-870A-UD3 mobo show that they have both sata3 (6gb) & sata2 (3gb), we will ignore the e.sata jmicron sata 2 (3gb) for external devices right now…

have you tried the drive in both chipsets?

have you tried configuring the bios with either IDE / AHCI ?

based on the driver download page, you need to have the driver win7 and hit F6 during boot for install, for the gigabyte controller, configured in ahci mode… perhaps the same for ide mode… it couldnt hurt checking the settings in the bios

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OK thanks! I will give those things a try. I put my HDD from my other desktop into the new PC and it worked fine; I had the WD in there as well and Vista could see it but couldn’t access it (gave me the same “check to see that the drive is properly connected” message).

I did try the WD HDD in all the SATA ports on the motherboard…no luck…

I’ll give your suggestions a shot and then tell you what happens.

Thanks again!!

WOW…apparently, when I used my other HDD and ran the Gigabyte disk to install drivers onto the mobo, it configured something, because just now I got the driver you recommended and was about to use it when Windows actually recognized the WD HDD and it installed!!! So…it looks like my problem is solved. 

Thanks for the help!!!