Can't see new drive

[Chisel]

Just installed a second hard drive in our newish Dell Dimension 8400.

When using F2 to go into bios, see's the original drive as 0 which is fine, but doesn't list the new one.

Set each of the SATA 1,2,3 to on (they were off to start with) but still doesn't pick up the new one.

When I go into Disk Management it doesn't show the new drive there either.

The new drive is a spare ide drive that I had, and as the pc is sata based being fairly new, I got a connector from Videk that plugs into the 40 pin connector on the back of the drive and then converts to a sata cable that then connects to the motherboard.

Don't know if that is part of the problem and if I have to do something different as a result ?

Any suggestions appreciated.

[Panama Red]

Essentially you are trying to convert a PATA ide hard drive to a SATA just by adapting cables? Don't think this will work. Just connect your old drive to an IDE channel the same as your optical drives are on. Check the boot order in bios to assure that the SATA is the primary boot hard drive and you'll be good to go.

[Chisel]

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

Don't have a free ide connector on the motherboard unfortunately. Only has the one ide connector which is used with one cable with two connectors for the dvd and cd drives.

So traced an adaptor from Videk which as far as I can tell does indeed convert the ide 40 pin to a sata cable connection, see http://www.videkonline.co.uk/home.asp?page=SubSections&sectionID=195&chapterID=31 but maybe it doesn't do what I thought after all as it's not working so far !

Thing is I have this 300gb maxtor ide drive that was a warranty replacement and wanted to use it for backup as its too good to leave sitting around and I don't want to have to buy a further sata drive for backup if I can avoid it.

Don't know whether I need to do something further in the bios or whether this just won't work at all, but then why market a convertor ?

So I am assuming it can work and that I just need to amend the setup somewhere, if I can figure out what and how ?!!!

[Cricket]

If that 300GB Maxtor is just going to be for back ups, you might want to consider putting it in an external HDD housing that connects to the computer by a USB port. This is how I store back ups of important files (along with burning them to CD-Rs). I've been using this Bytecc external housing (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145343) lately and it works pretty good. The nice thing about using an external housing is it's portable and you can use it on all your computers for backing up data.

:) Cricket

[Chisel]

Hadn't thought of that Cricket.

If all else fails will probably resort to that, but would like to get it working as is if possible, as have already spent £30 on the adaptor !

Can't ring the company for advice at the moment it being the weekend, but hoped somebody on the forum might have some idea's as to how to make it work.

Hopefully it's just a bios change or something similar.......