I've an old G31D-M7 motherboard which has 2 x SATA2 Connector.
I recently got a SATA3 (6GBPS) HDD (Seagate Barracuda 500 GB - ST500DM002) but when I try to connect to it, it takes a long time to detect it and if it can detect it at all, it throws a hard disk error soon afterwards.
In BIOS (if it's detected, it does not show any capacity information).
SATA1 is set to (and successfully reads) my optical drive. SATA2 is set to the HDD.
Both ports and cables can recognize my old SATA2 hard disc without problems.
I tried-
Changing cables. Changing ports. Restting BIOS to defaults. Taking off the CMOS battery and "hard" resetting it.
Upgrading the motherboard + CPU + memory is not a viable alternative for me at the moment. I've learned that a SATA 6GBPS HDD is compatible with a SATA 3GBPS port / cable. Is this true and what can I do to resolve this?
EDIT: The HDD is brand new. And is unformatted in all likelihood.