I purchased two new OEM Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB hard drives from TigerDirect. When i put those bad boys in, Vista installed them properly. However the drives didnt not show in “My Computer”. I checked for lose sata connection, updated the bios, uninstalled, then reinstalled…. no luck. To fix the problem just use fdisk in any *nix os. Here is simple step by step.
1. Go to http://www.xubuntu.org/get and download urself a “desktop” iso
2. Burn it
3. Reboot your computer and boot the live cd (without installing)
4. Find the Terminal….called “Terminal”
5. type in ” sudo fdisk -l “. This is going to list all the hard drives connected to your computer. Make sure you pick the right one. Since these are sata drives it should be called sd*, (sda, sdb, sdc…etc)
6. When u figure out which drive u need type “sudo fdisk /dev/sda” (switching “a” with the drive you want)
7. Type “n”, to create a new partition
8. Type “1″, 1 being the partition number.
9. Type “<enter>” … twice. This is just selecting beginning and ending of the drive.
10. Type “i”, This is to change the format
11. Type “b”, This is to select Win 95FAT32. Basically good enough for windows to recognize the drive.
12. Type “w”, Nothing has happened until you write
13. Wait until ur prompted to type. This means it’s done
14. Reboot, into vista
15. Vista will ask you to reformat… do so to whatever you like, and your done :)