The scoop: My aging home-built rig (478 P4 3.0) had an Abit AI7 MB that was slowly hatching bug after bug. It's now been down and useless for months, and investing in another old-school MB to get it back up seemed a waste. Also, I'm in a lazy rut and don't feel like learning all the latest bits and pieces, pros and cons, yada, yada. I just needed a low-buck but fairly capable home system for non-gaming, mild video-editting and MS Office usage. I'm relying too much on this 2-year-old laptop.

Without spending weeks on reasearch, I quickly settled on a refurb'd Gateway GM5626 at Tiger for $350.
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So I set it up, fired it up and all is going well enough. I then decided to gut the case and move the internals to my Antec 900 case, and that was completed just fine, and it started up again just fine.

Next step, I wanted to add my spare hard drives. The first, a WD 250Gb SATA got hooked up, and was properly recognized on a restart- no trouble.

Then, I added a WD 500Gb SATA (in a hot-swap rack). On restart, the BIOS saw it, but after the first little progress-bar graphic from Vista, the screen went black and stayed there. I pulled the drive, restarted again, and once in Vista, slipped the drive back into the rack. Vista went through the normal 'new device found' routine, stating it installed successfully, but it didn't show up in the 'Computer' list. I figured I'd now restart and then it might come up fine... but it went black again in the same spot.

The drive is known good, showing up fine in other systems. The Intel MB has 4 SATA connectors on it (one still unused). No PATAs are currently connected. Could the rack have a quirk in Vista that let's the drive only be 'almost seen'? The rack worked fine under XP in the other system.

Any clues where to start troubleshooting this?

UPDATE: Seems the rack is somehow the issue, as I connected the drive direct and it's up and running properly, instantly. I'll now try pulling the drive, connecting the rack without a drive, and run the system through a couple of restarts to see if it wants to 'install' the rack in some way. Then I'll slap the drive in again (with fingers crossed) and see what happens...

I tried this under Vista, but got no responses. Here's the problem again, with some added info-

I needed a new home PC *NOW* so with little research and little-er funds, I quickly settled on a refurb'd Gateway GM5626 at Tiger for $350.
????????????????????????????? (Gateway product link at left)

So I set it up, fired it up and all is going well enough. I then decided to gut the case and move the internals to my Antec 900 case, and that was completed just fine, and it started up again just fine.

Next step, I wanted to add my spare hard drives. The first, a WD 250Gb SATA got hooked up, and was properly recognized on a restart- no trouble.

Then, I added a WD 500Gb SATA (in a hot-swap rack) connected to the MB (has 4 ports). On restart, the BIOS saw it, but after the first little progress-bar graphic from Vista, the screen went black and stayed there. I pulled the drive, restarted again, and once in Vista, slipped the drive back into the rack. Vista went through the normal 'new device found' routine, stating it installed successfully, but it didn't show up in the 'Computer' list. I figured I'd now restart and then it might come up fine... but it went black again in the same spot.

The drive is known good, showing up fine in other systems.

I have since added a PCI card to add my older IDE hard drives, all three of which came up just fine, too.

Seems the rack is somehow the issue, as I connected the drive direct and it comes up and runs properly, instantly. I'll now try pulling the drive, connecting the rack without a drive, and run the system through a couple of restarts to see if it wants to 'install' the rack in some way. Then I'll slap the drive in again (with fingers crossed) and see what happens...

Meanwhile...any ideas?

Sounds like a Bios setting to me. You will perhaps needs ACHI settings for your drives

I poked around a bit and it seems Vista is supposed to have those already (?) I also saw a comment suggesting I could disable disk cache on the one drive- might that work? Seems I have to hook it up direct, disable cache, then move it to the rack and see if it boots properly thay way...or would another process be better?

Switching the BIOS from IDE to ACHI...would that require reinstalling the OS?

Hello is this an old HDD?If yes it maybe a little damaged?Are you able to run CHKDSK?

The drive was bought new 6 months ago, and used with this same swap rack on my previous XP system. It was only installed to receive files for storage, then removed and stored as an archive. Total hours on it is less than 12.

As I said, if I connect it direct to the new MB, it works fine. The system only gets confused when it is in the rack.

OK, trial and error is discovering a few things.

The MB has 4 SATA ports. I added a PCI card that provides 2 IDE connectors (4 drives).

With one or two SATA drives attached at the lower pair of SATA ports, the PCI card sees the 3 IDE drives I have attached to it- no problem. Hooking the empty swap rack to a 3rd SATA port still locks the system up. Hooking a 3rd SATA drive to the same port, without the rack, makes the primary port on the PCI card vanish, losing both of those IDE drives.

Sooo....it appears the PCI card uses the MB resources of the 3rd and 4th SATA ports to do its job....so I can't have it both ways (4 SATA, 4 IDE).

For my next trick , I've put the rack on the 2nd SATA port. That seems to work, so unless one of you gurus has a solution that allows 3 SATA/3 IDE to co-exist internally, I'll just live with the one SATA (and 3 IDEs) mounted inside and the rest of the SATAs (2 at the moment) will use the rack, as needed.