M4A77TD motherboard not reconizing my Seagate HDD

Try setting the raid or sata setting to "achi", if it's an option in your bios. Otherwise, use ide and disable raid if it's a separate setting and you don't need it. I use maxblast 5.0, a free download or it should be on your hardrive installation disk, if you bought a retail boxed drive. This is a large file; once installed, you can prep your drive as a boot or secondary drive and set the partition size. Then do a fresh windows install or clone your old drive. The drive with your operating system is protected when adding a new drive so you can't format it by mistake.

Thanks for getting back to me so quick!

I do in fact have the sata setting "achi" and it does not appear that "raid" is a seperate setting.

I will attempt to use the Maxblast program. From what I can read on the net this looks like it may be the boot program it is asking for, maybe?

I'm very much a new comer to all. I have downloaded the file. I'm not sure what to do next.

Install it on your current hardrive. You will have to reboot after installation. After rebooting, shut down your system and install your new drive. After bootup, click on the maxblast icon and decide if you want to clone your old drive, or simply format the new drive. Set up the new drive as a boot device. Then shutdown your system, disconnecting your old drive if you're not cloning it. Then power up with just the new drive connected and your windows dvd in your optical drive, and change the boot order in the bios to dvd>hardrive if needed. If you are using the same version of windows on both drives, you should be able to connect your old drive while the new drive is running windows and windows will configure it to the secondary drive automatically.

ok that actually sounds simply enough. my only problem is that the current computer I have is a laptop and therefore I do not have the ability to swap the hard drives. Is there a work around to this?

Is your new drive an external usb drive? Maxblast should also detect that. For regular drives, many laptops have enough space to add a second drive inside. If your new drive is portable, then prep it as secondary, and clone it.

Is the SATA power cable from the power supply plugged into the SATA HDD's power connector?

AHCI is the preferred SATA configuration, once you get the HDD detected in the BIOS Setup Utility.