SATA Drives (Hard Disk and/or CD-ROM/DVD-RW) not recognised - possible fix.

I had the following problems with recognition of internal SATA drives on an ASRock K10N78 motherboard/Windows 7 64-Bit (not that the problem has anything to do with Windows). This may help one or two people.

1.) SATA drives not recognised in BIOS during boot sequence.

My IDE hard disk was recognised every time, but I had to re-enter BIOS and keep reconfiguring and restarting the PC to get the SATA Hard Drive (i.e. my boot drive) and SATA DVD-ROM Drive to be recognised. All my attempts to cure this via BIOS settings failed.

Solution: Eventually it became clear that the problem was due to motherboard issues (I had bought an “as-new” mobo that was clearly not fully operational). When I replaced the mobo, the PC booted up first time (once I had been into the BIOS and selected the correct boot drive, naturally).

2.)    SATA DVD-ROM drive not recognised at all.

On the new motherboard, the SATA HDD was working fine, but it was only when I tried to load some tracks from a CD that I noticed that the SATA DVD-ROM was not being recognised in Device Manager. The drive had power, as I was able to insert discs, but no data was getting to the PC. Again this turned into a time-consuming and frustrating goose-chase.

Eventually I noticed in BIOS  that for some reason only 4 of my 6 SATA connectors on my motherboard were being recognised in “Performance IDE/SATA mode”. MY DVD-ROM was connected to one of the two that was not listed. After a lot of messing about with trying different modes in order to “recapture” all 6 SATA connectors (e.g. AHCI, which necessitated a couple of start-up repair sequences and got me nowhere – which was unusual as the previous, faulty motherboard has seemed to be okay with AHCI mode), it became apparent that the only thing to do was to connect the DVD-ROM to one of the 4 SATA connectors that was listed.

The DVD-ROM then worked perfectly! I do not know why all 6 connectors were not recognised. Right now, I’m just glad to have a PC that works!

Moral of the Story: Check your SATA connectors first and ensure that the drive is connected to one that is listed.