need help with SATA drive

ok, i built a computer the other day, and am trying to use a SATA drive. Specifically a hitatchi desktar 250gb drive. I am using the SATA ports that are on my mother board (abit NF7-S2G). when I acces the CMOS at power-up and go through options, it recognizes my hard drive as channel 3 master. sorry i can't be more specific right now, but any help will be aprecaited

What jumper setting is the hard drive on? Try it on Master and Cable Select, and post your results.

its jumperless.

Hmmm....have you tried updating your BIOS?

thats next. i'm taking the HD out of this computer and putting it into the newer one.

I don't get the Channel 3 master thing in CMOS. Shouldn't it be primary master? Anyway, the BIOS update should solve any size problems.

Channel 3 master is the hard drive. SATA drives are jumperless because there's no way to run two on the same connection as with IDE drives. It says channel 3 because you have 2 ide channels that take precedent over the sata drive. The computer does not need a bios flash because of this as it will still work fine.

unplug the CD &DVD roms, and I should be fine??

did ya get this fixed yet mike?Im following you around AF

nope... i think i'll throw in my IDE drives in for now.

ok guys I apprecaite the help now heres another thing. I've got WinXP on a IDE drive, works good, with RAID enabled, it shows the IDE drive and 1 of the 2 SATA drives! i've been messing around the BIOS and all but no avail. any reccomendations?

im not sure if this will help BUT my comp is sata and when i upgraded i didnt know that each power cable is for a certain sata plug. sata 1 has its own sata power plug an so forth when i put mine in i pluged in sata 3's power plug with sata 1's connecter and got what you were discribing.
so i guess what im trying to say is try the different power plugs you might have pluged in the wrong sata power one.


i hope i made some sense of this kind of hard to discribe :rolleyes:

im not sure if this will help BUT my comp is sata and when i upgraded i didnt know that each power cable is for a certain sata plug. sata 1 has its own sata power plug an so forth when i put mine in i pluged in sata 3's power plug with sata 1's connecter and got what you were discribing.
so i guess what im trying to say is try the different power plugs you might have pluged in the wrong sata power one.


i hope i made some sense of this kind of hard to discribe :rolleyes: not a whole lotta sense, but it gives me some things to try.

ill try again :rolleyes:
lets say you have 4 sata slots and each is numbered
sata data plug 1
sata data plug 2
sata data plug 3
sata data plug 4

now the power also has 4 plugs also numbered
sata power 1
sata power 2
sata power 3
sata power 4

you have to use the data and power cables that are numbered the same.(some boards may not be numbered)
if you try to use sata data 1 and power 3 the drive will not work


i hopw this explains alittle bit better :rolleyes: