Hi,

Just bought a Western digital 10,000 rpm sata Hard drive that I'd like to use for boot. Motherboard has 6 ata ports + an IDE. Have an old IDE HDD as master w/ an IDE cd-rom. When I plug in the sata hard drive it isn't recognised by computer bios. If I change the IDE hard drive to slave then it isn't recognized.

So what's the problem with these sata hard drives? Why does nothing recognise them?

Update -- if I disable the old IDE Hard drive and only connect the sata, when I boot from a CD-Rom then no hard drive at all is found. The bios recognises it as sata-1 but after that it's dead.

when installing winxp on a sata drive you need to hit the f6 key when asked, to install drivers for the sata ,these drivers are usually on the motherboard disk that came with the computer .the drivers will need to be on a floppy disk to load . before the drive will be recognized by winxp

Thanks very much. I shall try that. I did get the new sata HDD to boot under Linux (RHEL5). I didn't set the sata up as ACHI under bios which did the trick.

I am still having problems installing Windows on it's partition. I may upgrade to Vista which hopefully would have sata on the CD but will try the boot floppy.

Thanks very much.

John K.