Yesterday I went to move my old backup storage harddrive to my new dell Dimension.  It used the old EIDE cables, which was fine, I needed a new harddrive to prevent failures.  I purchased a western digital 160 GB SATA hard drive from best buy.  Here is something I learned:

 

Using a secure SATA cable (where the power and data cable are attached, and come out of only one cable that goes into the motherboard)  will not fit in the standard blue hard drive holder kit provided.  You MUST use the single data ata cable.  Make sure when you buy the harddrive it does not contain the secure cable.  In my experience over the past 24 hours, western digital uses the secure, whereas seagate does not. 

 

You need to use the supplied P5 cable as the power source, or else the bios will not recognize the new harddrive.

 

Switch the cd ata cable that is next to hd1 with the other empty sata adapter, and place the hd2 adapter in that spot.

 

Go into bios, turn on all sata ports.  Restart, then place in hard drive installation disk to install.

 

I spent a good 5 hours mucking around with my desktop and case trying to get the WD hd to work, even took a drill to the case to get it to fit.  The seagate hd took less than 5 minutes to install from opening the package to being able to write to it.  Just wanted to save someone some headaches and time.

 

-ed