Extra Hard Drive not seen by system

[Sprainogre]

I'm having an issue installing a second hard drive in a refurbished HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF (i5 3470) that I just got. I updated it to Windows 10. The drive is a Seagate 2tb (hybrid). As far as I can tell it's properly plugged in and all, but Window's won't see it. What am I doing wrong? Is a 2tb not compatible with my system? I'm not sure what other information is needed, and could use some guidance/advice.

Thanks for any and all insight on this!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

A 2 TB drive is supported in that model PC.

Did you connect it to the SATA port labeled 1 on the motherboard?

That's where it needs to go.

Does it show up in the BIOS?

That is the first place to look to make sure it is recognized by the PC.

In Windows, use the disk management utility to format the drive if it appears there.

[Sprainogre]

There it is under disk manager! Can't believe I didn't check that!

Thank you so much for the help. I probably would have banged my head against a wall for days before I thought to look there! I'll give it a format and hopefully that will be that!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

[Sprainogre]

After a few attempts, I still cannot get the disk to format. I'm in admin mode of disk management, and all of the options for this drive (labeled "Disk 1", with "Disk 0" aka C being the drive my OS is on) are greyed out accept for "Convert to Dynamic Disk", "Offline", "Properties", and "Help" as well as "Delete Volume" (the drive has a partition on it, I don't know if that's something with it being a hybrid drive or something else).

If it can't be formatted, is it just a bum drive? Do I need to delete to partition? Do I need to go though BIOS?

Thanks again for any and all help!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I never tried to format a hybrid drive.

You may need to delete the volume and then see if you can format the disk and you may have to convert it to a dynamic disk.

Hybrid drives are normally supposed to be used as boot drives, not for storage.

They have a SSD cache which boosts performance.

It could be a bad drive.

You should have been able to easily format a regular hard drive or SSD as a basic disk.

[Sprainogre]

Yeah, the drive was given to me by a friend. Never used and he just didn’t need it. So I’m working with it as best I can. 

I’ll probably delete the partition and go from there. If the drive is dead, that stinks but oh well. 

I’m really confused about it not being able to be formatted. 

thanks again, I the assistance is appreciated!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance.

It should have been a simple few second process to format the drive, so unfortunately, I don't have any other suggestions for you to try.