I need help installing a SATA hard drive in an older computer

[mayhem117]

Hi, I'm having a problem with my computer.

LONG version: First about 2 or 3 years ago I bought a SATA hard drive for my older computer that only takes IDE hard drives (My tech knowledge was not that experienced back then). So my awesome 1 TB SATA hard drive ended up sitting around for a long time, I eventually bought a PCI SATA card (Yes, my computer is so old it only takes "PCI" cards), but this PCI SATA card ended up not working so that sat around in a box for awhile too.

Now just a few months ago I was interested in upgrading my old computer's graphics card and had to buy a new power supply (old one was only 200 Watts) so I bumped it up to a 380 watt power supply. While I was putting everything together I decided to try and connect the SATA hard drive with the PCI card I had bought. Lo and behold it worked and I began to install windows on my new hard drive. But everytime I turned on the computer I noticed that the hard drive wouldn't show up when first turned on and I had to let it sit for a minute or so then restart it for windows to boot properly (I think this was the PCI sata cards fault since it usually lists the device name and it would say boot device not found).

Another 2 weeks later I was unhappy with how little the graphics card had made a difference in my computer so I ended up sending it back. But while I was trying to switch back to my old graphics card the computer refused to boot up the hard drive and I was unable to get it to work. I eventually, had to go back to my old IDE hard drive and put the hard drive back in the box.

Does anyone know what I can do to get my PCI sata card to work right when using my other graphics card?


Short Version:
I'm using a PCI sata card and a PCI graphics card. The graphics card works fine but my computer refuses to run a hard drive when connected via the sata card. The PCI sata card also seems to crash when a heavy load is placed on it. When this happens I usually have to restart the computer to get everything to show up again.



I don't know what could cause this, the older graphics card I was using never had a problem and that had a much higher wattage then my current graphics card so I don't think the power supply would be an issue.

 

[strollin]

Did you try switching to a different PCI slot, maybe swapping the video and sata cards? Sometimes it can make a difference.

 

[mayhem117]

Okay I just tried to changed the PCI cards around on my computer. Graphics card was in slot 1 then 2 empty slots on the bottom. The 3rd slot was where I had the SATA card plugged in. I changed it by moving the graphics card to slot 2 and then having the SATA card in slot 1. Everything booted up normally and I was able to access the new hard drive but it was really slow in transferring files and just in using the computer normally so I figured it must be the old drivers for the SATA card. I updated them and decided to flash the bios to the latest version as well.

After I restarted my computer it started acting really weird. I think I may have got the wrong BIOS file from the Silicon Image site because the boot menu where it lists the SATA card and hard drive had nothing but "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" all across the screen then it went on to the "Starting Windows" where it had the same EEE's taking up the whole screen where there shouldn't be any of that. When I finally got into my profile, it turned off all the antivirus programs and told me my copy of windows was invalid then the computer slowed to a crawl while I was trying figure out how to fix this. I eventually shut down the computer and just took the hard drive/SATA card out and everything went back to normal. But now my computer seems more sluggish then before and I think it may have been because of flashing it with the wrong bios file. The Silicon Image site says not to use the system bios update with an add-in card, which was what I did.

So is there any way I can fix this new problem?

 

[iTony]

Take out the CMOS battery for 5-10 sec, it should reset the bios if that's what your looking for.