SATA sometimes not detected?

[Mark_263]

Hi! My first post! Hope I found the right place...

I built a computer and have it running Windows XP Professional perfectly from a 12GB PATA hard drive connected as master to the primary IDE port. I have a new 250GB SATA drive I wish to move the system to.

If I connect it to either of the SATA ports on my Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard, the BIOS only detects it maybe once out of every 20 reboots. If I connect it to one of the SATA RAID ports, it is detected every time, however I hear using a single drive as a RAID is bad practise?

If I have both the SATA and PATA drives connected at the same time, once I boot to windows from the PATA drive, I cannot see the SATA drive - even after installing SATA and RAID drivers to Windows.

Here's a few things I checked:
I know the drive and cable work because I have tried them in a different machine.
The drive is receiving power as you can hear it spinning.
I have also done the maths and my power supply is perfectly sufficient.
I tried with one stick of RAM.
I removed everything unnecessary from the motherboard and reconnected them one-by-one to see if it's other hardware that is causing the issue.
It's the same case with other serial drives (I've tried a few different ones to check)

To sum it up:
I would like to run my system from the SATA drive as it is much larger and is higher speed.
When connected properly, the SATA drive sometimes is not discoverable, however connected to the RAID slot on my motherboard, it is discovered every time but cannot be booted to.
I don't believe it is a hardware problem.

How can I get it to work?

Thanks

 

[CountMike]

It has SATA1 (150) controller, they used to have problems with SATA2/3 drives. See if your HDD have settings connectors at the back to set to SATA1. There may also be some limitations as to SATA drive size, in BIOS as well as in XP.

 

[Mark_263]

It has SATA1 (150) controller, they used to have problems with SATA2/3 drives. See if your HDD have settings connectors at the back to set to SATA1. There may also be some limitations as to SATA drive size, in BIOS as well as in XP.

Thanks very much for your reply - The drive's a Samsung HD250HJ - It has 8 jumper pins (so 4 jumper settings) but I have no idea what each does as there are no markings on the drive and the manual is pretty much useless. It does mention putting the drive in a different mode by installing some software? But I can't see this working if the motherboard can't see the drive in the first place... I have just tried the jumper in each position which has not been successful

UPDATE:
The problem here was my jumper! I tried a different jumper on pins 5 and 6 and now it's detected every time in the BIOS and in Windows! Thanks very much.

 

[CountMike]

Very good, I remember having problems like that with those first renditions of SATA.