Recently I replaced my original hard drive (which stopped working due to a static electric dischage – so i believe) with a Western Digital 500 g SATA drive.
The BIOS recognizes the new drive however the motherboard does not. i have used WD Data Tools to partition the hard drive and format it and the WD Data Tools recognizes it as a BIOS drive. (There are two tabs in the Data Lifeguard tools configuration utility, one that says Motherboard controller and the other that says unknown controller). This new drive is listed under unknown controller.
Here is what I have done so far:
1. Put a jumper on the SATA drive to drop it down to SATA 1 instead of SATA2
2. Changed the port on the motherboard that the SATA controller plugs into (from black to blue)
3. Tried a friends hard drive (which booted normally)
4. Called WD who said that i should take it back to the store and buy something else! (Huh!)
I cannot get the old hard drive to power up at all. This new hard drive gets power.
I have been trying to install windows server on the hard drive. The windows program loads into memory and then says that there are no recognized hard drives in the system and thus it will not continue the install.
I do not have any floppy drives in my system unit. I have heard from others that there is some way you can flash the bios or load drivers but in both cases it required a floppy disk.
Before I physically take the PC to a repair guy or GOD FORBID the young punks at Best Buy, I was hoping one of the techs out there can sift through my notes and determine specifically what the problem is.
A few more things:
The BIOS does show it as SATA-1 (so the jumper is working to drop the speed down)
The Lifeguard tools were able to create three partitions and format the partitions, but these were on the BIOS drive listed under the unknown controller tab.
Let me know what you come up with please….
Kind Regards,
Rod Urand.