Faulty cable or HD?

jstreett · 11-02-2009, 09:48 PM

My harddrive is getting old and making noise.So I went out and bought a new HD (WD Caviar Blue 320gb SATA HD). My old harddrive was a SATA hard drive as well, so I removed my old one, and put the new one in, plugging in the ATA serial cable to the motherboard (7 pin flat plug) into the same slot the old one was in (IDE master slot 2). I plug in the SATA power cable from my PSU into the new hard drive. I turn on my computer and go into the BIOS settings. At first my BIOS does not detect the new hard drive. And then after pressing auto detect several times, it detects the hard drive but says it is only 136 gb when it is actually 320 gb. Even when it does detect the hard drive on occasion, if I go to windows 7 installation, it cannot find the hard drive anymore.

I even went as far as plugging in my old HD with the new HD, and loading windows from the old hard drive. The new hard drive came up then, and I even partitioned it and formatted it. It was fine to use as a secondary drive so I figured it would work once I disconnected my old hard drive to install windows on the new one to use as a primary drive. Nope problems auto detecting again. Any idea what this problem is?

**BCCOMP** · 11-02-2009, 10:47 PM

What is the make and model of the computer and or motherboard?
Is the old drive SataI or SataII?

11-02-2009, 09:48 PM	#1 (permalink)
jstreett Registered User Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 9 OS: Windows 7 64 bit	Faulty cable or HD? My harddrive is getting old and making noise.So I went out and bought a new HD (WD Caviar Blue 320gb SATA HD). My old harddrive was a SATA hard drive as well, so I removed my old one, and put the new one in, plugging in the ATA serial cable to the motherboard (7 pin flat plug) into the same slot the old one was in (IDE master slot 2). I plug in the SATA power cable from my PSU into the new hard drive. I turn on my computer and go into the BIOS settings. At first my BIOS does not detect the new hard drive. And then after pressing auto detect several times, it detects the hard drive but says it is only 136 gb when it is actually 320 gb. Even when it does detect the hard drive on occasion, if I go to windows 7 installation, it cannot find the hard drive anymore. I even went as far as plugging in my old HD with the new HD, and loading windows from the old hard drive. The new hard drive came up then, and I even partitioned it and formatted it. It was fine to use as a secondary drive so I figured it would work once I disconnected my old hard drive to install windows on the new one to use as a primary drive. Nope problems auto detecting again. Any idea what this problem is?

11-02-2009, 10:47 PM	#2 (permalink)
BCCOMP Mod Hardware Team Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: New York Posts: 7,096 OS: Win XP SP3 / Windows 7 Beta / Open Suse My System	Re: Faulty cable or HD? What is the make and model of the computer and or motherboard? Is the old drive SataI or SataII? __________________ PC Wizard \| Everest \| Power supply info \| Memtest86+ PC Running Slow Speedfan