New Harddrive not recognized

Hello, I recently bought a WD 1T drive and I couldnt get it working, so i returned it saying it was DOA. The second one came and it did the same thing so i returned that one also. So the third i got a different drive to see if that would help. I got a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb. Now there is not power cable for it so I just have the secure connect sata cable in it. When i installed it and went into bios, once again it didnt show anything or couldnt find a new drive. (This was OEM btw) So i log in anyways to see if i can find it in the administrative tools thing and it wasnt there either. Now this is my second harddrive. I already have a WD 74g raptor in it. I even downloaded the WD lifeguard tool and it couldnt pick up the second harddrive either. Can someone please help me?
Thanks

My motherboard is a GIgabyte S-Series.

It doesnt have a regular four pin power cable connector to it so I figured that the sata data cable wasnt going to be enough. So i did switch it out with my other one and it still doesnt work. I have the power and data cable in it and still nothing.

xp sp2

well the thing is i just had a different raptor driver in there and it died. so i decided to buy a newer bigger drive to put in. and now all of a sudden it doesnt work

Do you have a SATA hard disk that works properly on that PC or do all drives fail to be detected? If none of the drives work, have you tried using a different SATA cable? There are not that many possibilities other than a BIOS that's not configured properly, a bad cable or a SATA controller that's gone south.

Knowing exactly what motherboard and other components in your PC might help.

Is the new hard drive detected in the BIOS, but not in the OS? Is the BIOS configured to auto detect the drives?

So if you connect a new drive using the working drive's SATA and power cables, it isn't detected?

How are you supplying power to the new drives? Are you using a SATA Power cable from your PSU or a 4-pin to SATA Power cable adapter like this one? [url=http://dealmario.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/serial-ata-power-cable-15-pin-to-4-pin-6in.jpg][/url]

You should try a standard SATA cable and a power cable like the one that I suggested. Then your new hard disk should be detected. Your problem is that power isn't applied to the hard disk.

kde2131, the drive won't show up in Windows if it isn't detected in the BIOS and it won't be detected in the BIOS until power is supplied to it.

Clues to his problem are "its not detected in the bios or the OS. and i manually try to detect it in the bios and it finds nothing. " and "i have one cable going into the harddrive. it looks like this. http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/1896.jpg ".

The type of SATA cable that he used is to make sure that power isn't applied through both power connectors for drives that have them (SATA and 4-pin Molex). If he wants to use a single cable, then he needs something like this: [url=http://www.satacables.com/html/sata-power-and-signal-combo-ca.html][/url].

so what you linked will work fine?
http://www.satacables.com/html/sat [...] bo-ca.html

Depending on the SATA connector that you use on the motherboard, SATA disks show up as master or slave in the BIOS. As long as the drive works, it doesn't matter.

The picture of your SATA cable was key in figuring out your issue.