[jamesarney]

hello all,
my neighbor asked me to look at his computer- Dell Dimension 4700 with xp home edition. The computer came with a 40G hard drive (connected to SATA-0) and the operating system became currupt. There are no backups and the data on this drive is very important to him.

We added a new hard drive connected to SATA-0 connection and the old (40G) was connected to SATA-2 connection. This was a simple way to keep the old and improve the system - may have been done in a better manner.

WindowsExplorer will not read the 40G drive though it shows in the bios and DiskManagement. It reads the new drive just fine.

If I flip-flop the drive connections -40G in SATA-0 connection- both drives are readable and I can copy data from 40G to new one - but start in SafeMode to avoid curruption blue screen)

Does anyone have an idea why this drive would not read when connected to SATA-2 connector? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Triple6]

Just a stab in the dark but...

Most Dell's require that you enable the each SATA port that you connect a drive to in the BIOS, if you don't sometimes the computer will still read the drive connected to that port but it will now functioning correctly.

Whats on SATA port 1?

[Mumbodog]

WindowsExplorer will not read the 40G drive though it shows in the bios and DiskManagement.

Does it have a drive letter?

[jamesarney]

There is no port 1. Just SATA-0 and SATA-2. The drive is enabled in the bios but I will check to see how it is recognized.
Thanks

[jamesarney]

There is no drive letter either in WindowsExplorer nor in DiskManagement. You also can not add or change the drive letter in DiskManagement.

Sorry, I didn't address that