SATA + ATA compatability

[chr158]

I'm posting on behalf of a friend here - god knows i always seem to be the one doing the leg-work. Anyway, he was using an SATA drive as his only HDD until recently, and decided to add a second 160G ATA for multimedia file storage.
Thing is, he can't seem to get it to work at all. As he lives miles away, i can't realy help out too much over the phone and i'm not an expert by any stretch. I suggested things like checking jumper settings etc but to no avail.

Are the two formats incompatible, or does he need an ATA-SATA converter, or could it just be that it's a dud drive?

Help, for my sanity as much as his!

 

[AxionTech]

What's the model of the ATA drive?

 

[whillowhim]

Depends what is meant by "not working". Hard to give 3rd hand advice, but I'll give it a shot.

If the computer itself has stopped working, I'd look to make sure that the BIOS is trying to boot from the right drive. On some this is more obvious than others, but it might be set up to try to boot off the unformatted ATA drive instead of the SATA. I had a simmilar problem on my system, and the easiest quick and dirty solution was to have the MBR on the ATA drive that then ran the OS on the SATA drive (the ATA drive was actually installed on a PCI raid 1 controller board, which made it even more strange, but since it worked and the system is still on the right drives, I'm not going to argue with it). I'd try playing around with the boot order in the BIOS.

If its just the ATA drive that isn't working, it could be that the motherboard is set up with an SATA bridge so that you can't use both the SATA ports and the second IDE connector at the same time. Try temporarily unplugging the CD drive and use the same cable to connect the HDD, and see if that fixes it (note: make sure the master/slave setup on the HDD is the same as the CD). If this is the problem, you might need to get a PCI controller card to give you an extra IDE slot, or if there is only one CD drive on this system you might be able to set it up as the slave.

 

[grafixmonkey]

Is he using Windows XP? Check and make sure that he has downloaded and installed Service Pack 1. It contains a fix that lets Windows properly use drives larger than 137GB.

Trying to use the IDE cable from the working CDROM drive is a good idea too. That should narrow it down to being software or hardware.