[leeleeder]

Hi, all. We are moving away from IDE drives to sata on one of our computers and it works a treat, but we are having a problem setting up a sata slave drive on our pentium 4. Does anyone know how this is done? We had no problem with our other computer except this pentium 4. We followed basically the same procedures as per normal but with no success. Thank you in advance.

[LiveBrianD]

With SATA, there is no master/slave to deal with. Simply plug in the drive, make sure the computer is set to boot from the right drive in the bios, and you're ready to go.

I suspect the problem is that the drive isn't formatted. Click start, run (or just click start on a vista/7 machine) and type diskmgmt.msc - from there, you might be prompted to initialize the drive. Do so, and then you can format it (use NTFS) and it'll appear in 'My Computer' and be ready to go.

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 09 May 2012 - 02:42 PM

[smax013]

LiveBrianD, on 09 May 2012 - 02:41 PM, said:

With SATA, there is no master/slave to deal with. Simply plug in the drive, make sure the computer is set to boot from the right drive in the bios, and you're ready to go.

I suspect the problem is that the drive isn't formatted. Click start, run (or just click start on a vista/7 machine) and type diskmgmt.msc - from there, you might be prompted to initialize the drive. Do so, and then you can format it (use NTFS) and it'll appear in 'My Computer' and be ready to go.

You might also need to turn on the SATA port in the BIOS. This is not common, but there are some computers that operate this way. My old Dell 8400 with a P4 had all SATA ports turned off except for the one with the hard drive that shipped with the computer. When I added a second hard drive, I needed to enter the BIOS and turn on the second SATA port.