Mobo wont read SATA drives!

[The Great Destroyer]

I picked up 2 500GB Seagate SATA drives from Newegg. Being my first SATA drives, i wasn't sure if they worked like IDE drives or not. On Tuesday I plugged everything in, turned the PC on, and my OS loaded. The new drives didn't show up in My Computer. Someone told me I had to format the drives first, and to try it with GParted. So on Thursday I ran GParted but couldn't figure out how to format the drives (at this time, both SATA and my IDE drive show up on the list). I ended up copying my OS partition from my IDE drive to both SATA drives, which took about 5 hours each. Then, when I went to restart my computer, it hangs right before the GUI boot screen (I have GUI boot disabled). I restart the computer and go into my boot select screen. One of my SATA drives are there, but it says its not a valid disk. I tried every combination of plugged/unplugged drive, and the only time my OS will boot is when only my IDE drive is plugged in. I tried running 64 bit XP Pro, and it won't recognize my drives. I tried running 32 bit XP Pro, and i get BSOD right after the "Starting Windows" message after it loads the drivers! I finally figured out how to check my SATA drives in my BIOS, and it was only reading SATA 2. I unplugged SATA 1 and plugged it into SATA3. It recognized it the first time, but when I ran GParted again, it didn't recognize either. I check the BIOS again, and it only recognized SATA3. So from there I tried to narrow it down. I swapped power cables, SATA cables, SATA slots, and ran each drive one at a time. My motherboard STILL won't recognize either drive.

I can't figure out if its a motherboard problem or drive problem. I don't want to have to RMA both drives if it ends up being a motherboard problem!

[nevermind1534]

is it the motherboard not recognizing them, or the partitions not being seen by windows? you can partition htem from within windows by going to start > control pannel > Administrative tools > computer management, go to disk management, then you can partition them. partition them as NTFS.

[The Great Destroyer]

thats what i want to do, but like i said, now i cant even load windows when they're plugged in along with my OS drive. at first it was just windows that didnt see the partition/unallocated space, but ever since i used GParted to copy my partition, it just got worse.

[Luke122]

So the SATA drives are recognized in the BIOS?

[The Great Destroyer]

they were recognized in the BIOS, but not anymore. at first i thought i may have bent something, but all my connections are good.

edit: alright, i got both my drives recognized and installed in XP. the GParted partition copying was successful, but just to be safe i'm reformatting the drives through Disk Managment. then i'll try to run Norton Ghost or GParted again to ghost one of my drives and boot without the IDE drive plugged in, which was the whole reason for buying a bigger drive.

[haha49]

thats what i want to do, but like i said, now i cant even load windows when they're plugged in along with my OS drive. at first it was just windows that didnt see the partition/unallocated space, but ever since i used GParted to copy my partition, it just got worse.

Thats because the bois is trying to boot off the sata drive since it makes them all look like ide so you can boot off them... check your bois settings and make sure that your main drive is the one its booting off I had that problem a few years ago..

[The Great Destroyer]

i thought i tried that, but now its not reading my drives again, so i cant change the boot sequence when my sata drives aren't being read.