Best way to get a 500 gb SATA internal drive (Barracuda) to work as a backup dri

[Twwhilei]

Hello,

I bought a seagate barracuda 500 gb internal drive as a backup/secondary
drive for an HP Pavilion a1410y. All the PATA ribbons got used up already, but I plainly found two SATA connectors in the lower front (right-hand) corner of the mother board. Got power to the drive, as it spun up, but the operating system (XP Home) doesn't seem to recognize the new drive with the SATA cable plugged into either of the SATA ports. The only further reference about these drives seems to allude to using them for RAID purposes, which I don't really need. What should I do to get the drive functional here? I already checked the BIOS (3.19--seems like the most recent available). I also found multiple means to convert a PATA (40 pin) interface to accept the SATA drive--will getting a Slave/Master PATA (40 pin) ribbon work with this setup? I can provide other info, but most of all that seems extraneous to this question. If I believe it can help, I will answer.

Thanks so much for any help!

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you have no other sata drives in the system, in the bios, make sure the sata ports are set to IDE mode.

Then go into disk management and initialize the drive, then it will show up in windows.

 

[Twwhilei]

Thanks Hawkeye22,

I'll check that out when I can get to the computer.

I hoped that it could work that simply, just don't play around with the disk management very often. Speaking of, how do I get there again?

FYI, I originally posted the mobo as an ECS RC410-M (Alhena GL-6), but it got chopped.

Thanks again.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Right click (My) Computer and choose manage. On the left hand tree menu under Storage there is Disk Management.

 

[popatim]

You may also need to enable the sata ports if they are disabled.

 

[Twwhilei]

Right click (My) Computer and choose manage. On the left hand tree menu under Storage there is Disk Management.

Thanks

 

[Twwhilei]

Thanks everyone! Just needed to convince the computer to use it from Disk Management. Didn't even need to play with the BIOS!

Thanks again!

 

[Twwhilei]

Best answer selected by Twwhilei.