Hi all.

So, I recently bought a Samsung SATA 400 GB hard drive. I also bought a Rosewill E-SATA 1.56 Port PCI Adaptor. I installed the adapter without a problem: my system recognized it immediately. But now, after I installed my hard drive, the BIOS refused to recognize it. The strange thing is though, when I hook up my old Maxtor 40 GB IDE hard drive along with the newer one, i'm able to get windows to come on (because when I only hook up the Samsung, it says something like 'hard drive disk failure' or something) and my computer will then see that I have installed the Samsung. But it still won't recognize it in the BIOS at startup, meaning that it's not really there. I don't want two drives, I only want the Samsung to be the master but it refuses to work. Can anyone help me please?

I use a Windows 2000 computer btw.

If I understand your post correctly (and BTW, thank you for posting good information about your problem and operating environment - a welcome change from many of the postings here) your environment has Win2k able to recognize the large SATA drive when booted from a normally sized Maxtor. So the Win2K drivers can be inferred as handling the interface with the large drive.

Apparently you want to make the SATA the boot drive, right? And that would require that the system BIOS have drivers to allow it to do what the Win2k drivers are doing when Windows is loaded. The drive makers recognize this and provide the drivers. It appears that installing them may be non-trivial, which means careful reading and following of their installation procedures. And that after verifying, as well as possible, that the mother board system BIOS can support the card and/or the drive's BIOS mods.

You might also want to check your motherboard manufacturer's website, and make sure you have the most current drivers for your OS and that motherboard.

There is a thread with good information on the 137 gigabyte "barrier" titled "Accessing More Than 137gb On Large Hard Disks" at http://thieves/vb/all/windows/t-3...Disks-read.html which may be useful to you.

Very large HDD's require special drivers. These often come with the drive. This will be especially true with non OEM drives, running on non OEM adapters.

The first thing to do is re-read the instructions that came with the adapter and the SATA HDD, with special attention to references to installing and getting BIOS recognition of very large drives. Check the websites of both manufacturers for the same kind of references.

To get information (such as the BIOS version and status) about your machine, if you don't have it recorded, you can use Aida32, ver. 3.94.2 by Tamas Miklos. It is available for download from h---://download.s o f t p e d i a .ro/software/SYSTEM/INFO/3942.zip or through the S o f t p e d i a gateway at h---://www.s o f t p e d i a .com/progDownload/AIDA-Download-6969.html that is "S o f t p e d i a" btw. as in s o f t p e d i a (You will have to remove the extra spaces and add the http:// to get the correct URL, or google [ aida32 3.94 download tamas ]. When I type in the URL without the spaces it gets changed to a 404 url.) Alternate source: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/AIDA32/1033800563/1 betanews

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