# Adding a Hard Drive to a Dell Optiplex 745



## degreen

I currently am running 3 computers and am having problems with 2 of them. The small problem is in my Dell OPTIPLEX 745 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo unit, I currently have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive with Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit O.S. & I tried to add a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 second hard drive for additional storage & the computer recognizes the hard drive in BIOS, but when the operating system loads & I go into My Computer the drive is not there. Is there an update for windows, BIOS, or drivers I must download for me to be able to use this hard drive for additional storage? Any input or knowledge would be greatly appretiated.


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## Old Rich

Look in Disc Management to see if it is there . . you will probably have to format it before it shows in My Computer

YouTube - How to initialize and format a new hard drive


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## degreen

Thank You I Will Try That


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## degreen

I tried Formating The drive & My computer will still not recognize it. Is there anything else I can do.


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## Old Rich

What exactly happened when you formated the drive? Did you initialize and partition it first?


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## degreen

yes I partitioned it and formatted it & windows still does not recognize it my computer


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## Old Rich

Does it show in Disc Management? Does it have a drive letter?


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## degreen

The Drive doesn't even show up in the device manager. I'm stumped as all hell & have no idea what is wrong. I know it's not the drive cause I connected it to another computer just to see if it was the drive and it came right up on my other computer.


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## Candy Loving

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/desktops/optix_745/pd.aspx?refid=optix_745&cs=28&s=dfb

Which model do you have ? (see above)
Note the puny Power Supplies these ship with. Which PSU do you have ?

What voltages does BIOS report ?

It might not be developing enough power to run another drive.


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## degreen

I figured it out. Stupid me my buddy told me that with the OPTIPLEX 745 you have to go into the BIOS & turn on your third & fourth SATA ports that they are not on by default.


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## Candy Loving

If the SATA port was not turned on, how can you partition and format the hard drive ? Did you do all that on another computer ?

Earlier you said the computer recognizes the hard drive in BIOS. How could it do that if the port was disabled ?


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## Tyree

Candy Loving said:


> Earlier you said the computer recognizes the hard drive in BIOS. How could it do that if the port was disabled ?


The Bios will see the drive but it's not usable until the port is activated.


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## Candy Loving

Tyree said:


> The Bios will see the drive but it's not usable until the port is activated.


Then the formatting and partitioning would have had to have been done off-system, correct ?


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## hro

Thanks for turning on the 3rd & 4th port in bios!
Supposedly the optiplex 745 is supposed to have 2 optical and 2 hard drives. Which of the 4 port positions 2 above and 2 below are optical and which are hard drive positions.

I am trying to install professional 64 bit windows 7 but it will not recognize com drivers restore utility Suite during the installation.

My optiplex 745 is very stable once going but at times it is hard to start many times in a row then it starts. The voltage on the green wire is zero when running which is supposed to start the computer. I suspect start button is shorted.


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