Ok Here goes I have a dell 4600 dimension - both roms are on ide cables. It came with one HD on a Sata cable with 1 open slot (sata) on motherboard. I got a 100 GIG WD HD-(from old PC). its takes a ide cable, So i bought on ebay a adaptor that plugs in the ide cable slot (on back of HD) and a sata cable plugs into it along with power cable( to run to the mother board) ..I am not familiar with sata....do i used jumpers ( i am guessing not ) and in my bios it has primary and secondary sata options. In the primary is my original HD with OS (of course) but when i enable the seconday to auto (it was on off) when i reboot it says can't find it (the secondary sata) and f1 to continue and for setup (f2) again... help please

sorry if this doesn't make sense i am a NOOB...Please help

its like it doesn't even know theres another HD in the pc

Hi Santa,

Welcome to PCHF!

You have done everything right in terms of setup from what you have said, and yes you don't need to worry about jumpers with SATA. So that leaves either a problem with the adaptor or the HDD itself. This might sound silly, but make sure you have enough power.

The best way I can think of to test if it is the HDD or the adaptor, is to unplug on of your CD-ROM's and plug in your 100 gig instead. See if the same thing happens?

The only time you have to worry about jumpers is if you have a SATA 2 hard drive and your board does not support it take the jumper and make sure it is on "force SATA 150 speeds"

Also welcome to PC help forum from me as well.

As madmonkey said as well about your power supply, company's love to send you low wattage power supplies so you have to buy a new one from them if you want to upgrade alot.. Do you know what size your power supply is? Like 400 watts etc..

I am thinking its 250 (around there). and i do have a ati 1600 xpro 512 meg. I was told it needs more then 250. but up untill now everything works fine...But if it was just under powered..hmmm....would it really not show up or run it at all>>>????

it would run uintill you burn out your psu..

But things will be real slow, and can actually ruin your ram..

You need at least 400 watts of power.. Maybe 350 but that 250 wow your pushing it..


Edit: I seen it cannot find your SATA, are you running XP sp2? If so you will need to use the disc that came with the hard drive. As Windows does not like finding SATA hard drives..

I just unpluged both roms and it still didn't work..and i know the hd works ( U said to plug it in the ide cable from the roms?) i just took i took it from a pc an dit worked fine..and under powering can ruin my ram ???? in my bios in drive configuration
sata prim drive-harddrive-my os
sate sec drive-unknoiwn device
primary master drive-off
pri slave drive-off
sec master drive off
sec slave drive-cr-rom

it says on boot
sata secondary drive 0 not found still

thank u so much for the fast replys and the help u guys rock