Why won't my BIOS recognize a SATA drive?

December 15, 2006 5:37 PM

Why won't my BIOS recognize a SATA drive?

I have a four-year old Dell 4500s with no SATA support on the motherboard. I bought and installed a PCI SATA card that seems to be recognized just fine, but the BIOS does not find a drive. I also tried an IDE/SATA adapter, but there's still no joy: the BIOS will not recognize that a hard drive is attached at all. I even tried clearing the NVRAM, but still no luck.

Since this is a small case, there's no room for leaving the original IDE drive and just adding the SATA. Is this just a case of old, outdated motherboard and BIOS, or am I missing something?

posted by malaprohibita to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You can confirm that the original IDE drive is still being detected in the slot that it was plugged into?

The cable is properly inserted? The drive is powering up? (It'll spin up audibly, and you can feel a slight vibration when it starts.)

Without knowing a bit more, have you following all of the instructions for installing the PCI SATA card? Have you read of any limitations in the manual to the adapter?

What brand is it, etc?
posted by disillusioned at 5:45 PM on December 15, 2006

The original IDE drive is still being detected.

The cables are inserted properly and the hard drive is powering up.

The drive itself is a Western Digital WD2500KS. The PCI SATA card is a Vantec UGT-ST200.
posted by malaprohibita at 5:53 PM on December 15, 2006

And just in case: the message at boot is "Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found". In the BIOS, the primary drive is showing up as "Unknown Device".
posted by malaprohibita at 6:35 PM on December 15, 2006

the BIOS on your motherboard won't see the SATA disks, since it doesn't know what a SATA disk is or how to get to it. the card you bought, though, should have a BIOS of its own on it that will manage the drives attached to it. you should be able to turn that drive off completely in the Dell BIOS setup, which will kill that message. you may also have to adjust the boot order. (as an aside, did you get a floppy or CD with the SATA controller? if you intend on putting XP on that new disk you may need to have a driver disk ready for it when you go to install XP.)
posted by mrg at 6:59 PM on December 15, 2006

And to make things more interesting, the Red Hat installation media seems to have no trouble identifying it. It looks like my problem is a Windows problem of some kind, and not the SATA card or drive.

Oh well, I guess this is a good place to document my experiences. I'll keep making updates for posterity.
posted by malaprohibita at 7:00 PM on December 15, 2006

I think you've got it, mrg. The issue is with the backup software I used (Acronis). I'll have to fiddle with things a bit more to get my original files back on the HD.
posted by malaprohibita at 7:05 PM on December 15, 2006

Lesson learned: Acronis home 9.0 does not play nice with a blank SATA hard drive. Putting linux on the drive somehow got Acronis to recognize it. The restore seems to be coming along just fine.
posted by malaprohibita at 7:53 AM on December 16, 2006

When the drive is blank, there is no master boot record, and no active partition (just a random google link). There may be an option in Arconis which gets it to access/restore that kind of drive information. Those settings might be off by default because accessing low level drive areas is very risky in some circumstances.

Installing something on the disk writes to those areas, which gets you started.. Whatever works :)
posted by Chuckles at 1:01 PM on December 16, 2006