Sata master hard drive and ide hard drive as slave

Sata does not have a true Master , Slave there really is no such thing. The issue here as far as I can see is this because sata has no master what you effectively have is a sata drive and ONE IDEA drive set as slave which wont work. Even though the system might be telling you the sata is the master its more likely its just because it might be the first drive in the first sata port. Go ahead and make the IDE drive master and leave the sata alone the sata driver should handle that drive all on its own.

Also make sure the drive is properly partitionned and formated, an unpartitioned drive won't be shown in "my computer".

If what I said doesnt work Dalaran is right with the next steps you should take.

i have done the slave to master thing and i know the drive is formatted correctly since i had used it before with windows 7 with an ide hard drive as a master with that 320gb being the slave. the thing is that the bios sees the drive and says its a master drive under ide and the raptor drive is a master under the sata connector. windows 7 sees the drive as installed drive the problem is that the drive wont populate to be recognized as a drive to read and write data to. i dont want to reformat this drive as it is a huge itunes and movie library and i dont want to have to remake a whole new itunes library. what can i do

If you go into drive management, is the drive being recognized and does it seem to be partitionned and formatted properly?

I never really used win 7 so I can't help with the specifics there

But I assume it's similar to win XP
Try this
Right click My Computer -> Manage

Under Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management

- Is the drive listed?
- Does it have any partitions listed?
- Is the file system format specified (should be NTFS)?
- Finally does it have a drive letter associated to it

If the drive is not listed, I'd suggest you check the device manager, make sure there is no conflict or missing drivers (mostly for ide/sata/raid controlers)

If the drive is listed but doesn't have any partition or filesystem mentionned, something is probably wrong with the drive and you might have to format it (consider plugging it in another computer first just to be sure it's not an issue with your setup, an alternative would be to boot your PC from a LiveCD to see if you still have the issue)

Finally if everything is fine, except for the drive letter association, just add one

It's pretty much all I can think about right now

it happened not to have a letter to assign to it so it wouldnt allow the drive to be posted or viewable by my computer. after i assigned it a letter it works just fine