Hi,

I am trying to install a new SATA drive.

The current bootable master drive is 250Gb Maxtor IDE drive. I have installed a new Samsung 500Gb SATA II 300HDD.

They are installed on a NForceE4-A939 board with 4Gb (3.54Gb) ram running Windows Home Xp.

Problem is the Pheonis Award v6 00PG Bios does not recognise the SATA drive.

Samsung's installation instructions for the SATA drive are quite clear and say that no drivers are required. The information in the MB manual is scant. Threads in this forum suggest that drivers are needed but according to the instructions I have not for this drive???

I can enter BIOS OK but cannot see how to detect the new drive.

What I want to do is to instal the new drive and then use Acronis to copy the system etc onto the SATA drive, and make the original drive available for back-ups etc.

Help please.

Kind regards

Martin

The only drivers for SATA drives are drivers an Operating System needs to install on it. The drive itself requires no drivers.

If the BIOS does not detect it I am going to assume it is a SATA I motherboard. Hence it will not detect SATA II drives.

There is a jumper on the rear of the SATA II drive to set it as a SATA I.

Change this and see if that is the issue.

Thank you Jephree for that information,

I didn't know that I needed jumpers on a SATA II drive to make it SATA I backward compatible - I can find no information on which position to put the jumpers. The pins are exactly the same as on a PATA drive, but I can find nothing in the Samsung manual or their website.

The situation is actually more complicated! I bought the Zoostorm computer two years ago from Pcnextday (UK) and bought it specifically because it specified a SATA HD. When I opened the case (last week) I found it was fitted with a parallel HD, so I am going to complain to PCnextday as the computer they sold me was not what I received!

So I will wait until I hear from them before I make any further changes, but if you can let me know where to find the jumper info I would be very grateful.

Martin

Hi jephree,

All is now solved, it turns out that in the IDE function setup of the Pheonix BIOS the Serial-ATA 1 and 2 drives were disabled. So I switched them on and instantly my computer recognised the drive.

Everything now working A.O.K.

Very many thanks

Martin

Thanks for the update. Glad all is well.

Thanks for reminding me of the BIOS settings as well.

Let us know if we can help further in the future.