Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[DellDim]

I just bought a Barracuda 1.5TB internal drive (ST315005N4A1AS-RK).  When I installed the DiscWizard out of the box, the program hung up. (I waited 3 over hours.)  Now it begins to install, then stops and backtracks (the progress bar runs backwards after reaching the end) and and says "the installation was interrupted before Seagate DiscWizard could be installed.  You need to restart the installer to try again.  I have rebooted and tried again multiple times.  There is nothing else I'm doing on the system while installing, and nothing I can uninstall.  This is true whether I choose the typical installation or a custom one. 

I'm likely going to return it to BestBuy tomorrow or Tuesday if I can't figure out what's wrong.   Can you guide me in the right driection here?

Thanks!

[Cantbecanit]

I'm guessing you're trying to run a new drive bare here?

If so, do this, use Windows setup to format the drive, then try Wiz again, if that fails fully install Windows and run Wiz, I've not used it myself so I can't say if it needs an O/S or not, but I suspect the whole issue is a driverless unformatted sata drive, once you've got it formatted the issue should resolve.

[DellDim]

I appreciate your reply, Cantbecanit.  Yes I am trying to install a new drive -- the new Seagate ST315005NA1AS-RK drive on a Dell Dimension 8400.  I would like it to be the drive running XP with my current drive (ST3160023AS) moving to just being secondary source of storage.  I was trying to use DiscWizard to "clone" my current drive and then switch the boot order, but DiscWizard won't install. 

I then tried to use Windows setup to format the drive, as you suggest.  However, Windows setup does not recognize the drive.  I may likely be doing something wrong there, but am not sure what to do.  I removed the SATA cable and power cable from my current drive and hooked them up to the new drive.  I booted with a boot disk in the CD drive.  It began setting up, but then said I had no hard drive.  I'm not sure why it was not recognized and I don't know how to format the new drive.

Again, thank you for your help.

[Cantbecanit]

You need a sata driver for it by the sound of it, that will be on the MB setup disk if you have one, or you can get it from Dell, if you can find the one that's not a pre install one, you can then install that to the existing drive and do a format of the new drive through Disk Management, should you need a pre install one, it goes on a floppy and during Windows set up it will ask for a 3rd party driver, hit the F key and install it, then the new drive will be recognised, whats happening is you have a bare drive and there's nothing on it to let the PC know it's there yet.