I have a testbed computer here that is a few years old and so far, every attempt to connect a SATA drive to it and have the computer see the drive have failed.
Nothing. Nada.
A lot of googling research came up with this page http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf at Western Digital Corporation about Jumper Settings.
Jumper setting you ask? SATA drives are not supposed to need jumper settings!
Well, adding a jumper onto pins 1/2 (spread spectrum disabled) and one on pins 5/6 (150mb data transfer speed forced) worked!
A little background. The motherboard is am MSI KM4M-V (MS-7061) version 1.
I comes with a southbridge VIA VT8237 v2.1 serial ata bios… one of the first.
Many folks had issues with this early bios and there were some attempts to upgrade it, but I have not tracked those down.
So.. the WD3200AAKS sata hard drive is recognized and boots and all is well. The next step is to see if both jumpers are required for it to be operational.
So:
ONLY Pins 1/2 jumpered – fail – spread spectrum
ONLY Pins 5/6 jumpered – success – 150mbps force
Good to know. Now we can test the 1tb drive WD10EACS which also was not recognized.
The “good” WD 320gb drive completed testing in about 1 hour.
The “problematical” WD 1tb drive is now estimating at much much longer.