Can't see new hard drive !

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.

 

I'd go buy another sata and simplyfy things but having said that go look here for your solution http://www.xpcgear.com/idetosataconv.html

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply Toke. I was beginning to think there was no one out there !

I don't think the gizmo you suggested will help though as it looks like it's intended for a sata drive to run off of an ide controller, whereas what I have is the reverse !

As I don't have a free ide connector on the motherboard (only has the one ide connector which is used with one cable with two connectors for the dvd and cd drives), I 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.a...95&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 ?!!!

Any further ideas welcome.......

Cheers

 

I'm not really specialized into s-ata hdd's but did you try to change jumper setting on the ide drive?

 

There's one way to do this fast and easy, Format the new harddrive so it can see it by itsself. Then install it as a second drive. Or update your bios so it can see the 300 gig drive. You may be limited in the bios to see that large of a drive. May have to use an over lay software program also. Or have 2 partitons on the drive to see it all.

 

Yep, I'd guess the jumpers should be checked as well. Make sure you're running the IDE as master if you don't have any other drives on the same channel.

Here's a picture of the difference between SATA and IDE for anyone that'd like to see.
http://www.64bits.se/guider/pcbyggarskola/sata.jpg

 

Haven't had time to try anything else on the problem today, but encouraged by the replies.

Will try changing the jumper setting to master as suggested, have currently got it as slave but it's not on the same channel as the master drive so that might do the trick.

Badflash, in case the jumper setting doesn't do anything, how would I go about formatting the drive if the system won't recognise it ? How would I update the bios to see it, currently it doesn't show in the bios ? Probably dumb questions but I don't have a huge amount of experience with this stuff !

Thks