SATA Help Needed

[JeepMonkey]

My hard drive recently died.  So I bought a new WD 500 GB.  The SATA cable had the typical SATA plug on one side, and the other plug is, from what I can tell, a SATA plus power connection.

I installed the SATA drivers from a floppy during the install of XP process, but the OS install still doesn't see the HD.  I have a SOYO motherboard purchased around two years ago.

Will an "older" MB work with this newer HD?

[tetsu96]

There shouldn't be any drivers you need to load for SATA drives, most motherboards with onboard SATA should recognise them.  One thing that you should check on is that the SATA is enabled - I've got a Soyo Dragon with 4 IDE and 4 SATA connectors, and 2 of the 4 SATAs won't be seen unless enabled in the BIOS.

[Samstag]

Is the drive spinning up?  Your driver floppy may have a DOS utility to verify the drive is working.

[BobA]

1.  Does your MB bios recognize the new SATA drive?  Is your SATA
    connector on the MB or an aux card?   If it is on an add on card
    the card may have its own bios for the sata.

2.  If it is recognized run the admin tools/disk management and partition it.

3.  Format the partition.

4.  It is now ready to use.

[JeepMonkey]

The SATA connection is on the MB.  The SATA port has been used before with another HD; it is enabled and works.

I did not check the BIOS.  I will try that.

This is a pic of the SATA cable...
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/1896.jpg

What exactly does the second connector do?  Some sort of power I assume, since my new power supply has some of these type of connectors.

[Harry Potter]

That looks like a bracket for both the power and data cable.

See if there's another port on the back of that bracket which is wider than the data port, but ultimately similar in appearance.



If your powersupply doesn't have anything like that coming out of it, then you need one of these:


Edit: Just noticed you mentioned that yuor power supply does have one of those. Plug it in and watch it work.

[Samstag]

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html

Western Digital's proprietary SecureConnect cable fits over the SATA power connector, but does not provide power to it. This means that the IDE power connector must be used when a SecureConnect cable is used."

What an absolutely stupid design.  You'll need to plug a standard 4-pin power connector into the drive to get it to work.  Or ditch the cable you have and use standard SATA power and data cables.  

[JeepMonkey]

I tried to use a regular SATA cable and the 4 pin molex power connection, didn't work.  I tried the other power connection plug with a regular SATA connection, didn't work.  I used the "special" WD cable with the 4 pin molex power plug, didn't work.

Maybe I could try using a regular SATA cable and the L shaped power plug instead of the Molex power plug?

[Harry Potter]

What is the model number of your SOYO motherboard?

[JeepMonkey]

MB is SOYO model SY-KT600 DRAGON PLUS v.1.0

[Harry Potter]

You may also want to play around with the jumper settings.

Here's a document for the WD drives:
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf

[Harry Potter]

Bummer dude:

http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=69

[JeepMonkey]

 

Thanks for the link Harry.  If my MB has a max capacity of 250GB, would it recognize the 500 GB drive, but only be able to use 250GB?  Or would it not register because it is too big?

Also, I remember the box saying it is a SATA 300.  Is SATA 300 any different from SATA of say two years ago?

[Harry Potter]

I think you're out of luck on this one.

On old 80GB EIDE drives, you used to have the option through jumper settings to force the drive into a 32GB mode thereby allowing it to be used on ghetto PCs.

From what I've seen of the jumper settings on SATA drives, they take that option away.

Look on the bright side though. New motherboard!

Or maybe not.

[Thenasty]

I think I will hit this on the SPOT.

Your MOBO only support SATA 150 and your DRIVE is set to 300 and that is the reason it won't recognice it. You need to set a JUMPER on the DRIVE to be 150. 

Also make sure you plug the SATA cable on the FIRST SATA on the MOBO. I had installed a seconds drive on my setup and plug the cable in the 3rd SATA and system did not recognise it. I had to plug it in the 2nd (1st one is my boot drive). Its not like the old IDE/EIDE that you can just connect it anywhere. 

[JeepMonkey]

I tried the jumper setting to enable 150 support,thinking that my MB wouldn't support the 300, but that didn't work.  I sent the drive home with a buddy last night to see if his machine, a newer super-gamer, would recognize the drive.

At this point, I think I will just buy a new MB, processor, and RAM then get my old machine working enough to turn it into either a myth tv box or maybe another MAME machine.

[Harry Potter]

The jumper setting Thenasty mentioned just changes the method by which the drive communicates with the SATA controller. It has nothing to do with the size the drive will report.

The motherboard bios can only physically address 250GB so changing the drive communication setting won't do anything unfortunately.

This is actually a good wake-up call for me as well since I was gonna invest in some 750GB drives but I guess I had better check to see if they'll work with my 2 year old ASUS.