Hard drive sometimes not recognized by bios

[King Ralph]

I installed a secondary hard drive on my Dell Dimension 4600. The drive is a western digital caviar blue 320 G. This drive has data only.

On boot-up the bios sometimes does not recognize the second drive. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't.

As per WD instructions, drive is not jumpered. It is connected with a SATA2 cable - could this be the problem?

WD has not been any help. Some sites have suggested adding a delay in the bios to allow time to recognize drive.

Any ideas?

 

[dEAne]

Please check both the data and power cable, if either of the two has a problem then you cannot use the drive. Just try another sata cable from the other computer first then the power cable (you can tell if power is being applied to this drive by touching during power up). Check the BIOS if it is detected - it should work.