Windows Isn't letting me used my new HDD

melikepie

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Dec 14, 2011
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I just got my 250GB Seagate Barracuda back because the drive was corrupted. Now my BIOS detects the drive and Windows does but Windows doesn't show it usable, although in the hardware tab of any storage device it shows up with all the drive include a 250GB drive, which I assume it's the one I have. I'm not sure if I'm missing something to this but it wont let me use it. Any ideas?
 

melikepie

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Dec 14, 2011
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So I found the issue. Now I did need to format it, although that wasn't the problem with the disk. The reason why I sent it back in to Seagate was because every time I try to read/write is normally said I had an IO error, sometimes making the disk disappear until I restart my PC, and a lot of times stopping my computer from booting up fully. So as soon as I got it back in the mail, all the formatting programs I used failed, saying that there was an error. So I tried Windows Disk Management hoping it would work better, although I successfully formated the drive, it started giving me IO errors again. So what I did was take out one of my 2 DVD drives from the SATA ports and plugged in a brand new SATA cable except to my HDD and as soon as I started up my PC, Windows downloaded drivers, then told me to restart, it checked for consistency, then everything worked just fine. So maybe I didn't need to mail it back in the first place. I think it was a faulty SATA cable or SATA port.