SATA problem
 

Greetings,

I need help. I have two SATA drives. My motherboard has slots to attach two. One slot works and both drives are recognized and ready to go when attached to it. The other slot doesn't recognize for either drive. They are both storage drives and have data on them, so I can't re-format. My other (non-SATA) drives are working fine.

Only one SATA channel activated in BIOS?

Just to make sure that the second drive is formatted and ready to go, try this. Go into the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management. It will list all of the hard drives that are connected, even if they are not usable by Windows.

If they're all there, make sure you've installed your chipset drivers. Some manufacturers use different brands(requiring different drivers) of SATA controllers for their motherboards.

Also, as LiquidAcide mentioned, check your BIOS to make sure that both SATA ports are enabled.

Thank you both for the help! I have not been able to figure out where the SATA ports are in BIOS. I know one is turned on because either drive with work when plugged into it, but the other must be off because neither one is recognized when plugged into it. I googled this topic and it said to check 'Integrated Peripherals', but I was unable to find anything about SATA drives.

Then check the whole BIOS or get yourself the manual (either in print form or as download from the mainboard vendor).
If the channel is not deactivated in BIOS then it is possible dead.

Also pay attention on BIOS POST if the drive is recognized during this procedure.

The second SATA port is not recognized anywhere that I can see. I downloaded the manual, but in the BIOS I still cannot find a place to turn on the second SATA port. It may be because they use different terminology than I know. I deleted the foreign language pages and attached the manual. Maybe you could give it a look and see what I'm missing. Page 26 mentions SATA, but doesn't say how to turn in on.

Thanks again!

Look inside the menu "integrated peripherals". If there are no options to enable/disable the SATA channels then probably they're both enabled all the time.

Maybe you should pay attention during POST if the SATA channel status is printed to screen. Most of the time the detected devices are shown for a short time. If such a message exists then both devices should show up. If only one device does show up and there are really NO options in BIOS for SATA then I suspect the second channel to be dead.
If the second device shows up then its probably a software problem and you should get something like a Linux live CD (gentoo, knoppix, whatever) to see if the device is detected by the kernel.

Thank you for this information. I appreciate your expertise and your time. I will follow your ideas, but I think you are probably correct that it is dead, unfortunately!

Many thanks!

Hey, its your mainboard and your system - I can only make guesses what the problem is. But I think it's worth the time finding the real problem instead of getting a new board.
i) A new board is not exactly cheep (if you want to get a decent one)
ii) If the problem still exists on the new board then you wasted money for nothing
iii) I doubt that a SATA channel dies without influecing the functionality of the board

If you want to give up, its your choice ;)

My new SATA drive is used for backup, so, for now, I've decided to store it. :-)

Thanks again! :-)