Windows 7: Problem picking up a drive

Hi there, I recently installed windows 7, I love it but it wont detect any new hard drives.

I have a 320gig sata hard drive and want to connect a IDE drive. If I connect the IDE drive to slave it picks up nothing all it picks up is my Sata Drive.

is the IDE hard drive detected by the BIOS or the power-on screen?

If the IDE hard disk is the only device on the cable, it should be set to Master.

Hello Heindre Welcome to the Se7enforums!

Besides being listed on the first post screen when first powering on the system unless a factory logo is enabled what sup3rsprt is asking if you see the drive listed in the boot order section of the bios setup as well.

If the drive is "raw" lacking any formatted partition you would go into the Disk Management tool or use a 3rd party drive partitioning program to create one or more new partitions and then see those formatted where you can assign a logical drive letter to each of the one or more created.

The first thing of course when adding in an ide drive on a system presently booting the OS from a sata is to go into the bios setup to reset the boot order to see the sata drive made the default boot device since the ide controllers will override sata by default setting the ide drive as the default boot device.

I cant pick it up at all is there anything that I can do as I really want to connect it.

Also a friend has a IDE drive with windows 7 on, the moment we put the second IDE drive on it doesnt pick it up.

Please advise.

Also can a SATA hard drive just be dead???It doesnt pick up, we put power and a sata cable on it?

A drive that doesn't show up in the initial post tests or bios setup can either be toast or be plugged in with a bad data cable. Even sata cables see bad ones at times. When adding in the second ide drive that may have to be set to cable select rather then set as slave. I've seen that one a few times on older builds.