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New Computer Build - Will Not See SATA HDD

HenslerHensler Registered User regular
edited February 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
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.

Hensler on

Posts

  • pacbowlpacbowl Los AngelesRegistered User regular
    edited February 2008
    thats not normal. the bios should see the drive if that sata port is enabled and unlike ide, theres no need to jumper it. something might be wrong with the drive or the cable.

    getting windows to see it upon installing is a whole other issue.

    pacbowl on
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  • HenslerHensler Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Hmmm, I tried 2 more SATA cables, and it continues to show a blank spot in whatever spot I have it connected to. Since the CD drives seem to be working fine, I moved it to one of those spots, and it still does it.

    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.

    Hensler on
  • skyboxskybox Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Is there any way you can take the drive and test in a computer you know to be working properly? That would be a good way to determine if it's the drive, mobo, or whatever. Other than that, you may just have to send it back to NewEgg.

    skybox on
  • pacbowlpacbowl Los AngelesRegistered User regular
    edited February 2008
    im oldschool like you, but have installed a few sata drives. as far as i know there's no trick to it. the bios should see the hdd just like it sees the cd drives as long as that port is enabled. ive never seen one come up "blank" before which leads me to think theres something wrong with the hdd. theres no raid/sata drivers or anything you need to load for the bios. it should just "see it".

    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. ;-)

    pacbowl on
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  • HenslerHensler Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I'm pretty convinced that it's a bad drive - I'm going to see if I can find a 100gb drive here in town tomorrow, and see if that has the same problem. If so, I'll use that until I can RMA this back to Newegg. If not - then I have no idea.

    It blows, but things were going way too smoothly up until this point.

    Hensler on
  • ShmoepongShmoepong Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I had the same problem a while back. I solved this by installing the sata drivers that came with the mobo. The computer restarted, I set my sata drive as the first boot device and that was it. Hope this helps.

    Shmoepong on
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  • vonPoonBurGervonPoonBurGer Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Shmoepong wrote: »
    I had the same problem a while back. I solved this by installing the sata drivers that came with the mobo. The computer restarted, I set my sata drive as the first boot device and that was it. Hope this helps.
    That would resolve an issue with getting Windows to see a SATA drive, but if the drive name doesn't even appear in the BIOS, that's a different issue.

    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.
    pacbowl wrote:
    theres no need to jumper it.
    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.

    vonPoonBurGer on
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  • HenslerHensler Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    Alright, I went to Bestbuy and got another 500gb drive. I hadn't planned on getting something that big, but it was very nicely priced for it's speed. Anyways, the BIOS sees this drive normally and I'm installing Vista right now, so I'll be sending the other drive back to Newegg today. Thanks for all of the help. SOLVED!

    Hensler on
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