Connecting SATA Hard Disk drive as a slave/secondary disk to a PC?

Question

I have a SATA Hard Disk Drive(HDD)which I want to connect to my PC as secondary/slave disk. The PC has one Primary HDD which is SATA interface too.

As we know SATA HDD's have no jumpers to set it as secondary or anything. But the mother board I have did not have a extra SATA connector. So I just unplugged the CDROM/DVD drive sata connector and power connector and used them to connect this second SATA HDD to the existing system.

Is this correct way of connecting a second SATA disk as slave?

The PC did booted up(Windows-7 x64) but could not show me the second disk as a drive?

If everything else is fine, should this drive be detected?

thank you.

-AD

Answer 1

yes this is the way to go. You can connect only one device per channel

It is strange you have only 2 SATA ports on the motherboard - maybe very old one

Answer 2

You need to change it all in the BIOS. The BIOS controls boot order for SATA: it's actually really nice compared to the horrible jumpers. You just tell it which SATA device is the boot device, and you're done. Very simple.

As for why it's not showing up, SATA is a little picky, so it's probably not picking up the new drive because the type is set incorrectly. Some DVD drives need to have IDE emulation set, even though they have SATA connectors. If that was done, it would cause this sort of issue. Again, this is set in the BIOS. You can probably just switch it to "AUTO".