A few weeks ago I built my first computer with the help of a friend and it turned out perfect. I ran Windows and installed it etc. Then eventually I went to put in a CD burner and I started it up and the hard drive died. I ordered a replacement and hooked it up perfectly nothing went faulty but no matter what I do (change the serial port, use a different power supply connection and even try to make the computer auto-detect it through the bios the drive still goes undetected. however...my IDE drive from THIS computer is detected. is the hard drive faulty again, or what?

So wait, you put in an EIDE cd burner and the SATA hard drive died? When you say you changed the serial port, do you mean you changed the socket (on the motherboard) to which the SATA hard drive is connected to? Which brand motherboard, chipset, bios and SATA controller are you using? The reason I ask is that some of these are known to have compatibility quirks (like the Nvidia nForce2 chipset combined with the Silicon Image 3112A SATA controller, if I'm not mistaken), and the problem you seem to be reporting (SATA and EIDE don't play well together) has come up before. Try booting it again with just the SATA drive (no burner) and see how it responds. Also, if your bios gives the option, try and set the SATA controller to a lower PCI IRQ than the IDE drives, and see if there is a setting for allowing/disallowing the IDE interface to have priority over the PCI bus. Hope this helps. -Jayce --END OF LINE--

hate to be so simplistic, but have you added the sata driver for the motherboard from a floppy at startup or setup?