I am having major probs installing a 2nd SATA drive on my system.

ASRock P4VM8 motherboard - supports 2 SATA drives.

First (already running XP) drive is a Seagate 160GB SATA w/8MB cache.

The new drive is a Western Digi 400G SATA2 7200RPM w/16MB cache.

Plugged it in etc. Powdered up PC. BIOS wont even recognize new drive.

I even tried removing old drive completely and installing XP on new drive today and still nothing?

Am I missing something?

Place or set the jumper cap to pins 5 and 6 in your new drive.

Place or set the jumper cap to pins 5 and 6 in your new drive.

There is a note on WD drive 'Jumpered pins 5 and 6 enable SATA 150MB/s only operation.'

Whatever that means.

How is it the BIOS wont even recognize it at all?

If it would be easier just to install the WD400GB drive and do away with the old one I would. But if the BIOS wont 'find' it then XP cant see it when I run the XP setup from CD drive.

Will try the jumper thing anyway. Cheers.

Another clue. Could be an I/O conflict prob. I went back to my old setup (without the new drive) and everything works fine. Or so I thought. I have a firewire card in my PC so I can download my vid's from the cam-corder.

The firewire por has worked fine in the past but this time when I plugged in my corder to the firewire port my system frooze. No way out, just frooze?!.

I rebooted it and it just sat there. No BIOS system screen, nothing, no cursor even?

Thats what happened when I put the second drive in the other day and I to reset the BIOS by shorting the pins out. Was the only way to get my pc to run again.

At one point the other day I had the second drive hooked up to the 2nd SATA input on my mother board and I got past the BOOT screen but then it would just reboot after I got to the XP loading screen?

Will try the 5$6 pins when I find a jumper. It never came with any.

Without your new drive installed, does your system run again without any problems?

Was your new drive provided with a "secure connect sata cable" from the manufacturer?

Jumper it by shorting pins 5 & 6 then connect it to your system.

Yep. System is running again with no probs. Just today (as mentioned) I plugged my cam corder into my firewire port (seperate PCI card) and it frooze the whole pc. That never happened before my experiment with the 2nd HDD.

New drive came with the cable. Red one. Just like the other one on the old HDD. I even tried the new one with the current HDD and it worked.

Will try the 5&6 pin theory when I get a moment

Cheers.

Remove the firewire driver, if any or remove it from the Device Manager. With the computer off and unplugged, remove and install again the firewire card. Let windows detect and install the driver.

when using an ordinary sata cable like the one on the old drive. Be sure you do not use a 4 pin power connector of the drive. Use like the one on the old drive sata power connector.

Done!!
Jumper pin did the trick straight off. Installed jumper on 5&6 plugged it in, started PC. When XP started I went to Disk Management and formatted drive. All good.

Cheers for help all!!

Okay... Glad it worked......

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.