Hi,
My power supply popped the other week and I replaced it and thought I would add another hard drive while I was at it. I tried connecting to the second SAT slot on the mobo but nothing was found, I then tried to check if it was the slot on the mobo by switching the primary hard drive onto the second slot and booted up and it was not detected.
I think therefore that the second sata slot is either not working or do I have to enable it somehow?
I have a Dell Dimension 5100 running XP.
Thanks for any help.
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General discussion
Second Hard Drive
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10 Posts
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I looked in Disc manager and I see my partioned primary hard drive but nothing else.
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If that doesn't work...the drive may be simply be DOA.
Does it spin up ?
VAPCMD
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I can feel vibration from it when it powers up, I did say that I swapped over the primary drive sata cable to the second sata slot and then my PC would not boot up, so it's definately the slot.
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It won't show in explorer until it has a partition. That's because it won't have a drive letter. Did you check in disk manager? If detected in the BIOS, it should show as un-partioned space. Generally on systems with two SATA slots, there's nothing to enable. Some that support RAID...and there would be a minimum of two needed...they can be optionally used as standard ports by changing a setting in the BIOS. As well, some would have an option to emulate IDE or IDE enhanced which would allow the OS to be installed without having SATA drivers handy at the time. It doesn't sound like yours is one of these types.
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I cant see it in disc management, that's leading me to believe the sata slot is faulty.
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and see that everything is set correctly and that includes whether or not all SATA connectiors are enabled.
Get the drive recognized in the BIOS and the OS will then find it.
Just because you attached the initial drive to the secondary SATA port and it wouldn't boot means nothing if the boot order was not also altered.
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It's clean, no need for a vacuum, I can see all the pins are clean. I, thinking that I have an old firewire card (I don't use anymore) using one of my mobo slots (PCI I think), is there a card that has a SATA slot that I could utilise? I think that may be the way to go.
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