Computer not detecting SATA hard drive

T

TheOrteganator

New Member
Here's the problem:

After walking into CompUSA yesterday, I discovered that they were having a huge closing sale. I purchased what I could to build a computer, but I am not quite there yet. I decided to put the SATA hard drive that I purchased in the computer I have now for extra storage. The primary drive that is booted from is an IDE drive. I plugged it all in according to directions, but it is not listed in BIOS or in 'My Computer'. The hard drive is a Western Digital 250 GB SATA 300 MB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB cache. Other computer specs:

AMD Athlon XP 3000+
ATI Radeon 9550
1GB DDR RAM
Asus A7V8X-LA Motherboard
Windows XP Home SP2

Any ideas?
 
make you sure set the jumper to sata1 if your mobo only supports sata1

also go into the mobo's bios and make sure that you turn on the sata bus

most mobo's have settings for sata/pata/both
 
I may have found the problem. The power supply I'm using dosen't have any SATA power cables. I have it hooked up to the power supply with the same connector as the IDE hard drives use(the white one with pins.)

Should that be working, since there is a spot on the SATA hard drive that plugs into that, or do I absolutely need a SATA power connector?
 
Either power connector should work fine, just don't use both :P

As mentioned above, you probably just don't have the jumper set correctly on the drive. Be sure it's set for SATA150 and not SATA300.
 
You shouldn't have to change the jumper on a SATA drive at all. They're set at the factory. So, can't see it in the BIOS? I suppose that means you wouldn't be able to see it in Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Storage: Disk Management?

Like was said before, try to enable the SATA ports in the BIOS, then restart and check the BIOS again.
 
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On the W/D you put a jumper on the second set of pins from the left to set it at 1.5! The bottom photo!
sata.gif
 
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Thanks, I'll try that. However, I read on a different forum that HP may have disabled SATA support in the BIOS and that it cannot be unlocked. I hate HP now. Good think I'll be building my new system later this month.
 
also if you only have one set of SATA ports they might be set into RAID mode, and not IDE mode. This is changed in the bios.
 
You could see if there is a patched software to flash your BIOS and unlock these extra options. I don't personally know where you could get it, but someone here will know ;-)
 
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