Hi all, I installed a second hard drive today. Everything is fine in the BIOS, the drive is found/recognised etc., but when I load W2000 it tries to install the drive, even though the utility I downloaded from the hard drive manufacturer's website says it's been installed. If I go through the Windows installation, it prompts me for a driver location, but I don't have any drivers. If I ask it to display a list of suitable drivers it says it can't find any. I have Win98 also on the original hard drive, and it recognises the new drive immediately without attempting to install etc. Anyone know how I can get W2000 to install the drive? I've looked on the manufacturer's site (westerndigital.com) but they don't supply any drivers... Thanks.

have you tried driverguide.com or driverzone.com

Is the HDD formatted? What is the HDD? Company names, Hardware specs, the exact verbose errors, all these things will help us help you. You've got a HDD w/ 98 & 2000 in separate partitions as the boot drive, you've installed a 2nd HDD (WD), when you boot 2000 tries to install the drive (normal...2000 must register the HDD to the registry, update the sys info, just because it's Phyically installed does not mean it's Logically installed to the OS) then should say Windows needs to reboot the finish... Where does yours differ? Is it being seen as something other than a HDD to 2000? Have you check Event Viewer?

Thanks for the replies. Western Digital supplies a utility (Data Lifeguard v10.0) that's supposed to install, partition and format the new drive (it is a Western Digital WD800JB). I ran it and partitioned and formatted the new drive. When W2000 boots, it attempts to install the new drive - but cannot find any drivers for it and I don't have any drivers I could point it to, so it never gets to the stage where it asks to reboot. Each time W2000 loads it goes through this process. It is being seen as a hard drive - I've checked Device Manager and Computer Management. There are no relevant logs in the Event Viewer. I tried both driverguide.com and driverzone.com, but neither has anything suitable. Thanks again.

I would try to FDISK the drive & leave it "RAW" or maybe format the whole drive fat32 and then see what happens. After, if you left it raw, goto disk management and format. Is your BIOS S.M.A.R.T. capable? Have you flashed your BIOS? Are you sure ALL setting(jumpers, cables[80pin], bios options)are all correct? It could be the Data LifeGuard that the culprit. You shouldn't need a driver for your HDD. This is from some else it computing.net in 12/2002 w/ no replies. Is anything between yours and his the same errors? " ASUS CUSL2-C with 512MB Running WinXP Pro. Had 2 WD600AB disks setup as Master/Slave on Primary IDE, nothing on Secondary, worked fine for over a year. Replaced slave with new WD800JB. Bios discovered drive and UDMA5 OK. Windows discovers WD800JB and "failed to load driver, error code 28" every time it boots. It seems it can be used but there is no disk.sys driver, just partman.sys. The older master drive has both drivers loaded. Uninstalled disk and ide drivers and updated Intel inf chipset data to no avail. What's up? "

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=jB5*e3Mg&p_lva=&p_faqid=77&p_created=1004830388&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTc1JnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9NCZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMT05MSZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj05MiZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPTIwJnBfc29ydF9ieT1kZmx0JnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li= This should give you some places to look.

Hi all, Thanks again for the replies. I ran Data Lifeguard again to install the drive, then used a W98 boot disk to format the drive to FAT32. After this, the drive is visible in both W98 and W2000, but W2000 still tries to install the drive when it loads. I could nearly live with the annoyance of having the 'Found New Hardware' dialog popping up every time, but the real problem is that the next time I boot, the drive is gone again....! (and of course, W2000 tries to install it again) I've tried conerting it from FAT32 to NTFS; leaving it as FAT32; creating extra partitions - nothing works - the drive is always 'lost' after the next reboot. I sent an email yesterday to Western Digital suppport - hopefully they'll know something I don't....