i have an alienware comp that came with a Seagate Barracuda 80G HD. i then purchased a 250G Seagate that is also SATA and hooked it up. when i went into the BIOS it didnt show it. So i put it in my cousins computer to see if it worked, and it worked in his. So now i just have a 250G HD sitting in my comp, that my computer cant read!. any suggestions would be VERY helpfull. ABit AV8 AMD 3500+ BFG 6800GT AGP 1 GIG RAM 80G SATA HD 250G SATA HD Enermax 460W NEC DVD+RW/CD+RW Alienware
Sounds like a jumper problem. You need to read the documentation that came with the 250 to see where the jumpers need to be at on BOTH drives. Some drives are strange in the fact that they are very particular on where the jumpers are set on both of the drives or one of even both of them don't work. Usually the case with Western Digital's too.
i ordered it from newegg and it didnt come with one. i have never installed a hard drive before so im not to sure how to work a jumper
Whoops! Forgot the SATA portion of that statement, sorry. There is no master / slave relationship with Serial ATA drives, they boot in a point-to-point manner and usually the operating system views both of them as master drives.
That being said, assuming you used the same cables in your friends box, try swapping the cable connections of the data cables on your motherboard, if you haven't tried that. This is very strange with that kind of computer, and two disk drives of the same manufacturer, everything should automatically configure itself.
the wierd thing about my 80G HD is that in the BIOS it reads it as an IDE Master Drive?. Is that helpful? and yes i have already tried swapping cables and stuff but when i use a molex adapter to power the Drive Windows will start up. But when i dont use the molex adapter and i use the other SATA power cable, windows wont start and it says Fail-Safe Mode and to check the CMOS and BIOS settings when i boot up?
WAIT!! i checked the Seagate Website and it said this: Serial ATA is a new interface type. Some older systems may see the drive and classify it as a SCSI device if you are using a Serial ATA host adapter. This is normal even though this is not a SCSI disc drive. This does not affect drive performance or capacity. (My Alienware is a 2005 Model) I noticed that when i looked at my 80G hard Drive throught windows it said it was a SCSI device but guess i didnt pay any attention to that. So how should i configure my 250G HD?
They told me to FIND a J2 Jumper. They said that the 80G hard Drive is probably 1.5G/S and the 250G is 3.0 G/S so the jumper should bring it down to 1.5.
