Please help! Got a new WD 500GB drive that has issues...

[lakedude]

The new WD 500GB drive is for my Core2Duo system. It is actually working perfectly now hooked up to the CD rom's cable but now I don't have a CD rom hooked up. I suspect the problem is not actually the drive itself but perhaps a cable or the MB.

Here is what happened:

The system has 4 SATA ports. Zero and one were taken up by the factory HD and the CD, the numbered ports two and three do not seem to exist leaving numbered ports four and five open. I tried to hook up the new 500GB Western Digital drive to both ports four and five using 2 different SATA cables (both were kinda loose). The Bios would see the new drive most (but not all) the time. Vista's Drive Manager saw the new WD drive one time but then it went away and the HD activity light stayed on solid. Vista only saw the drive for a little while the one time. I tried several combinations of cables and ports and Vista never saw the drive again on ports 4 or 5.

I gave up on the new cables and ports and hooked the drive up to the CD rom cable (which was much more snug) and after initializing/formatting it seems to work fine?

What is going on? Bad ports? Bad cables? Wrong type of cable? Is there a difference in SATA ports or cables? Why would BIOS see the drive most every time (not every time) but Window would not see the drive? Any ideas?

 

[nukchebi0]

BIOS setting need changing?

 

[chookman]

I would also suggest its a BIOS setting somewhere... it would also help if we knew which motherboard you have.

 

[lakedude]

Thanks guys, I don't know what my MB is cause Dude I got a Dell.

Update. I think the problem is a loose wire somewhere in the main PS connector. My system has worked fine playing all sorts of games but I've been messing with it; installing more ram (twice), adding video cards, swapping between several PSUs, and finally the adding the 500GB HD.

Last night I went to play Portal and the vid card drivers kept locking up and the game froze up several times. I got to thinking that maybe the extra HD pushed the PSU over the limit so I disconnected all drives except the boot HD. The system would not even boot! The little blue light on the on/off switch stayed yellow. All I did was unplug the new HD! Anyhow after monkeying around with the wires the system finally came back on and was rock solid in Portal. I think that in the process of installing the new HD I pulled some of these wires and made a bad connection.


This MB is pretty close to mine:

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_overview.aspx?ID=en-us0000319