Sata hard drive and IDE DVD

[mowatj]

I have an Asus p5ad2 with 4 gig ram and a P4 3.6 processor. I am trying to use a sata hard drive and ide dvd. I cant get the board to recognize the sata hard drive. it recognizes the dvd player

I would appreciate any assistance that you can provide.

 

[manojgj]

check you BIOS setting, sata drives option may be disabled in olden mother boards

 

[Paperdoc]

As you check the BIOS, also watch for an older technique. In some older boards there was a sort of overlap. Some (but not all) of the SATA drive ports were set up so that you could use the IDE ports OR certain SATA ports, but NOT both. You had to choose other SATA ports that did not conflict with IDE ports already in use. Other motherboards did not do this so there is no confusion.

Now, there's a possible second item to check since you have an older mobo. It probably has original SATA ports on it that operate at the 150 MB/s speed, but I bet your new HDD is a SATA II capable of twice that. In that situation the new drive is supposed to recognize it and slow itself down automatically, but some fail to do that, and the mobo original SATA port can't communicate with the SATA II device. In that case you go to the website of your new HDD maker and look for how you can manually force your drive to slow down to 150 MB/s. With Seagate, WD and a few others it is done with a jumper on the drive. Some others use software tools to set parameters on the drive itself. Make sure this is set right, too, so your mobo can recognize the drive.

Now, you say, "I cant get the board to recognize the sata hard drive." How do you know that? If it simply does not show up in BIOS Setup and show in the POST messages during boot-up, then there is a hardware issue like the items above. BUT if it is present in the BIOS and you simply cannot see it in My Computer within Windows, then you probably have not done the required preparation of a new blank HDD for Windows. If that is the case, post back here for info on Initialization, or Partitioning and Formatting. Let us know which version of windows you are using.