So, I assmbled a respectable beast of a computer. I finally got everything wired up correctly, having eventually diagnosed the ear-splitting whistle-whine to be an unpowered graphics card, and then I got my baby to turn on. Wonderful!
However, it doesn't want to acknowledge the existence of my Western Digital SATA hard drive. Neither does it want the damn thing to turn on, if noise levels are any indication. A POST will acknowledge the CD/DVD drive and the case's lil' SATA connector as being connected, but no matter which of my 4 mobo SATA ports the HD talks to, POST does not acknowledge its existence except with a mournful "Xth Master Hard Disk Error," with Xth being a number that varies based on which SATA port my layabout HD is connected to.
It is a brand new hard drive.
Suggestions on the issue or advice would be welcome. I'm hoping that I overlooked something so I don't need to RMA the thing.
EDIT: Almost forgot. The
bios knows that the thing is there, but claims that it has a a capacity of 0.
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If you got it from a store, bring it back and tell them it's defective. If you got it from online, I'm afraid an RMA/return is in order. =(
I could be wrong and it could be something else, but I'm about 90% sure just based on what you said. It *could* be, maybe, that all the motherboard ports for the SATA are defective/broken, but that seems extremely unlikely.
Oh... have you tried using a different SATA cable? That's the only realistic possibility I can think of other than the drive being defective.
Check your bios to make sure booting from sata is enabled, on boards with ide and sata there usually is an option for switching this.
Take your hard drive back to a local computer repair place. Go in at a non busy time of day (not at lunch time and not at rush hour), and ask the tech if he will check your hard drive on a hard drive tester. There are 2 tests that can be conducted- a short test which lasts about 45secs ; and a long test that takes several hours. Most places will run a short test free of charge for you.