I just installed a new WD SATA hardrdrive in my older (10 year) computer, but the computer doesn’t recognze it. The new drive doesn’t even show up anywhere in the system. I am running XP with SP3. The old hardrive is an IDE drive and I was hoping to speed up the computer with the SATA drive, but first the computer has to know it’s even there, which it doesn’t. I guess one question is: Can you have two different harddrives, i.e. IDE and SATA, running at the same time? Another question is: Why doesn’t XP even see the new drive. I updated the driver for the new drive and when that didn’t work, I used a previous driver, but that didn’t work either so I went back to the latest driver. Any ideas?
Some early SATA controllers (eg VIA’s VT8237) are limited to 1.5Gbps. Does BIOS see your drive?
Windows XP requires a SATA preinstallation driver if your new drive is to be the boot drive. Otherwise try configuring the SATA controller in BIOS for IDE legacy or compatibility mode. This will make the SATA drive look like PATA.
