ATA drive not recognised HELP!

[only me]

Should a ATA drive be recognised in any system or only if motherboard supports, I thought that all were backward compatable but at the slower speed

any ideas

[chrisjl]

Is the BIOS set to 'none' or 'auto' for whatever IDE channel/device you've plugged it into? If it's set to 'none', your PC won't notice anything new.

[LaurenceFrost]

In terms of backwards compatibility, many of the new high-end motherboards such as the Intel Socket 775 boards utilise the new SATA (Serial) hard drives and only have 1 channel for IDE devices, but 9 times out of 10 you will need a CD/DVD unit here, leaving SATA as the only choice - making backwards compatibility almost non-existent.

If you have the drive plugged into an IDE channel however, it should work. The only things you can really check are the jumpers on the back of the drive (master/slave/master with slave present etc), and the BIOS settings which have already been commented on.

Hope this helps.

[annodomini2]

Sounds like your trying to run a new 'bigger' hdd on an older machine?

Some of the older motherboards may not like the newer hdd's, even though the drive may have been designed to operate on standard ide and not udma etc.

Plus some of the older systems have a limit on the size of the hdd they can handle.