HP Z8 G4 doesn't recognize secondary HDD

[MarcoC47]

Hi All,

We have an HP Z8 G4 workstation with the primary SSD with the operating system (Windows 10) installed over.
This disk is 250 GB. Now we need to upgrade the available space and we have tried to install anothe HDD in the workstation but that is not recognized from the OS. We have tried also to insert the disk unformatted.
We have tried to insert this HDD in anothe workstation (Z840) and it work correctly.

Do you have any suggestions?

[BambiBoomZ]

MarcoC47,

To make recommendations for a solution, it is important to know the brand, type and model of drive being added plus the method oc cinnection.  All those characteristics factors can affect the solution. An M.2 on a PCIe adapter as compared to an SATA mechanical drive, and NVMe or NAND memory- that kind of thing.

As a first look at the problem, compare all the BIOS settings relating to drives (e.g. RAID, RAID _ AHCI), the drive-related port settings (e.g. enable / disable) between the Z8 and the Z840, and verify the boot sequence.  As the new drive is visible in the Z840 and works, it may be worth emulating the z840 drive and port-related settings in the Z8.  Another possibility- though not too likely, is to determine if the z840 is by chance using MBR partitions as opposed to GPT in the Z8. Or, the drive may be formatted MBR and the Z8 may not see an MBR partition. 

Consider downloading and installing EaseUS Partition Master and try setting up the new drive: set as GPT, set partitions, and format. That program is very useful as it provides a complete graphical description of all the disks attached including flash and external drives.  It's very easy to use: drives and partitions can be formatted, resized, cloned, OS migrated - quite a lot of disk functions.

BambiBoomZ

HP z620_2 (2017) (R7) > Xeon E5-1680 v2 (8-core@ 4.3GHz) / z420 Liquid Cooling / 64GB DDR3-1866 ECC Reg / Quadro P2000 5GB_ GTX 1070 Ti 8GB / HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 256GB AHCI + Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe 500GB + HGST 7K6000 4TB / Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 sound interface + 2X Mackie MR824 / 825W PSU /> HP OEM Windows 7 Prof.’l 64-bit

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

is this new drive a mech drive or a SSD?

if a mech drive is it a SATA or SAS drive? the z840 supports both as it has a dual SAS/SATA controller built onto the motherboard, the z8 only supports SATA unless a optional controller is added to a pci-e slot

[MarcoC47]

The dive is a SAS drive.

I have change that with another SATA driver and it works correctly.