New drive not recognized

Question

I have a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 2 computer. It boots from a serial ATA 250GB hard drive. This is my normal boot drive and thats the way I want to keep it. It has a dual cd/dvd attached to the secondary IDE connector on the motherboard. I installed a second 160GB ATA/133 hard drive for additional storage and the BIOS does not recognize this drive. All drives in the computer are set to cable select and I set the new drive to cable select also. The slave (gray) cable is connected to the drive and the blue cable connected to the primary hard-drive connector on the motherboard. If I connect the blue cable to the motherboard and the black cable to the drive, the BIOS recognizes the new drive but then won't boot from the ATA 250GB drive.   I have gone into the drive configuration in the BIOS and set the primary ide to auto and then re-booted the system.  I still get a message to F2 into to setup or F1 to continue. When I go back into the BIOS it says primary drive device is unknown. Can anybody tell me what I am doing wrong?

ejn63 · Answer

The blue end of the cable goes to the mainboard. The far end goes to master, mid connector to slave - if this is the only drive on the chain, it should go to the master position.

TomXPS · Answer

It may be trying to boot off the 160 GB drive.    I think you can set the Boot up order or press F11 to select which one to boot off.   But in the setup there are some setting for the boot order.

gtop · Answer

See my post couple of days ago titled : Adding a second SATA drive.  The SATA interface connector on my motherboard was found dead.  Dell is dispatching a new motherboard. gtop,

redcaspar · Answer

Yeah it's trying to boot off the 160GB drive when I connect the black cable to the 160 drive. The drive configuration shows the 160 after I changed it to auto. So you are saying that I should then go into the boot sequence and it should show both drives and I need to set the 250GB as the boot?

redcaspar · Answer

I have the blue end of the cable connected to the motherboard and I haven't changed that at all. The problem is trying to get the BIOS to recognized the new ide drive. I tried first  with the slave cable attached to the new drive and with the changes made in the BIOS  it didn't recognized the drive, so I attached the black cable to the new drive. After doing this and changing the drive configuration in the BIOS the new drive was recognized but then the system would not boot from my serial ATA drive.

TomXPS · Answer

It a bit confusing on how to set it. But I think if you set it with F11 it may rember the next time and it will boot off the right Disk.

But basically you have to tell it some how to use the SATA disk instead of the IDE.

1Bowtie · Answer

Plug the black end into the new drive, leave the SATA alone, boot up pressing F2 to get into bios, arrow down to primary master and set it to auto, enter, make sure while your there to check and make sure your SATA drive is #1 and highlite it, enter, esc, save and exit, enter, when you get out it will tell your F1 to boot, do it, when you get to desktop go to control panel/ admin tools/ comp mgr/ disk mgr move the drive letters so your second drive is D: format it and your done.

redcaspar · Answer

Thanks everybody!

Storage, Drives & Media

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