First SATA drive - not working

[Giles Orr]

I recently had my /home/ hard drive crash and burn ... that will
probably be the subject of another post.  The good news is that my
backup regime worked (mostly).  So this question is about the new SATA
drive I bought to replace it, but ... I've never dealt with SATA
before.  I bought a 500Gb WD on College Street.  I have a Gigabyte
motherboard with an Athlon 2700+ on it which has two SATA connectors.
The drive will not register in the BIOS (or with the OS the one time I
tried).

Steps I've tried:

- I've reseated the SATA cable at both ends (ad infinitum)
- I've tried both SATA connectors
- I've reseated the SATA drive power
- the BIOS lets me select "IDE" or "RAID" mode for SATA, I've tried both.
- the BIOS has three sets of two IDE drives, although only two PATA
connectors: on the idea that the last of these are for the SATA drives
(am I right?), I went in there and told it to auto-detect.  No joy,
although it takes much longer to say "no drive" when this new one is
connected.
- the drive is powering up and spinning, it can be heard and felt.
- after the "press DEL to enter BIOS" message there's a SATA detection
and "User mode" message: this has its own key, and I can enter it but
do nothing because it detects no drives.
- I have several computers, but all are older and none of the others
have SATA to connect to.

It seems to me that there are several possibilities:
- the drive is bad
- the cable is bad
- the mobo SATA is bad
- the drive is larger than the mobo SATA chip can handle

Do I return the drive?  Do I buy a PCI SATA card and cable to put in
one of the other computers?  Do I whack the mobo or the drive with a
hammer?  Suggestions are most welcome, as I'm thoroughly chumped (wait
... Is that "stumped" or "chumped?").

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists