Hey everybody, thanks for any help you can give me with this.
I'm building my first computer in ~6 years, and everything with the actual assembly went really smoothly. There were some new types of components and such, but it's all basically the same things I remember doing before. So I've never installed a SATA drive before, and I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong. I connected the power cable to the drive and the data cable to the SATA1 port on the mobo. Simple, right? Well, something's not right. When it boots up and I go into the BIOS, I have a list of all 6 SATA ports on the mobo:
SATA 1: blank
SATA 2: DVD-RW
SATA 3: DVD-ROM
SATA 4-6 : NOT INSTALLED
So I moved the HDD to 4-6, and the blank spot moves correctly to correspond. So the system is seeing something in that spot, but not registering a drive. I can feel the drive spinning up, so I know it has power and is doing something. Anybody got any ideas? Is there some secret to making SATA drives show up in BIOS?
This is a Western Digital 500gb HDD and an ABIT IP35 PRO mobo.
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getting windows to see it upon installing is a whole other issue.
I suppose I can send the drive back to Newegg, unless someone has another idea? I really hope I don't have to do that - it was a huge pain getting to a physical address where I can recieve mail (Newegg doesn't do PO boxes) and I've been waiting a really long time to play games on this new system.
if the motherboard has an ide slot and if you have a spare ide hdd laying around you can still play games on it, but the load times will be a bit slower. ;-)
It blows, but things were going way too smoothly up until this point.
OP, I'd try installing anyway, hit F6 when prompted to by Windows install, and feed it your SATA controller's driver and see what happens. Maybe yuor drive just isn't populating that blank field in the BIOS with a model name. The SATA controller clearly sees something is plugged into that port, as it doesn't say "Not Installed", so it could just be a BIOS display issue.
Well, there is one possible jumper on a SATA drive, if it's a SATA2 / 3.0 GB/s device. Most new drives are SATA2, and they have a jumper to let you run them in a SATA1 / 1.5 GB/s compatibility mode. It's kind of a long shot that that would resolve the OP's problem, usually SATA2 devices work just fine plugged into SATA1 controllers, but it's worth trying that jumper if Windows won't install.