So today i went out and bought a samsung 250GB 7200rpm 16mb cache hardrive. I mounted the HD plugged in the sata connector and plugged in the power connector and also set the jumper to the 3rd column of pins which looks something like this |::(:):|. Anyways long story short after trying what seems to be everything i cant for the life of me get my bios to detect this HD!!! its set up the exact same as my 80gb sata i tried plugging the 250 into the working 80gb sata slot and it still doesnt work!!! any suggestions before i throow my computer out the window?

"set the jumper to the 3rd column of pins which looks something like this |::(:):|. " That is rather useless information. Where you put a jumper depends on whether you want it to be master or slave, and sometimes you don't need a jumper for one of those. E.g. you can't have two masters or two slaves connected to either of a primary or a secondary SATA controller. Which position is master or slave is printed on the label on the drive, or you can look up the jumper settings on the hard drive manufacturer's web site using the model number of the drive. If your mboard is more than a few years old, it's chipset and bios may not be capable of recognizing a hard drive larger than 128gb. If that's the case you will have to get a PCI SATA controller card and connect the 250gb hard drive to that. The card can cost as little as $30, or less. We need the answers to: - The make and model of your mboard. - Do you have at least XP SP1 updates loaded? Even if your mboard supports the recognition of a hard drive larger than 128gb, Win XP cannot support the recognition of a hard drive larger than 128gb unless at least SP1 updates have been loaded.

can't see what a service pack should have to do hard drive recognition in the bios. however, jumper settings may vary. refer to the manual, often a diagram is printed on the drive or look up info on the manufacturers website. Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.'

-ASUS P5LD2 -Yes, i have SP2 loaded sorry for the lack of info :( any help?

ASUS P5LD2 Support here: http://support.asus.com/download/do... Type P5LD2 at top left, choose P5LD2. I assume that's all there is to the model number - there are other models that have something after P5LD2. This from FAQ on the Asus web sites: "Model manufactured after 1st January, 2003 will all support 48bit HDD (137 GB HDD)." Since the oldest bios update available for P5LD2 is in 2005, your mboard chipset and hardware supports hard drives larger than 137gb (manufacturer's bogus "decimal" size; = 128gb binary size in Windows and in most bioses). Look at the mboard manual on your mboard CD, if it is not already on your hard drive somewhere. If you have lost track of the mboard CD, Mboard manual here: http://support.asus.com/download/do... Choose Global for a faster download speed. Starting on Page 2-25 of the document - page 47 of the pdf - is the info about the SATA headers on the mboard. Ignore the stuff about RAID if you do not want to use RAID. It appears if you are not using RAID you can connect a second SATA drive to SATA3 and the drive is jumpered as slave, or you can connect to SATA2 and jumper the drive as master. Bios Setup program starting page 71 of the pdf. Page 74 of the pdf - you have four hard drive controllers - the first two are IDE, the third and forth are SATA - by default the SATA drives are in IDE mode. Each controller can have up to two drives connected, one jumpered as master, the other if present jumpered as slave. Which jumper position is master or slave is printed on the label on the drive, or you can look up the jumper settings on the hard drive manufacturer's web site using the model number of the drive. Page 75 of the pdf - each drive position you have a hard drive connected to must be set to Type: Auto and LBA/Large Mode: Auto. NOTE that the bios may be set to "Not Installed" by default for some drive positions, or someone may have set it to that since the mboard was new! Page 76 of the PDF - the SATA controllers are set the emulate Standard IDE by default. If you wany to use RAID, there are instrctions about that in places in the manual before this, right after this, and more later in the manual. If you do want to use RAID with your existing first SATA drive, you will need to back up what you don't want to lose and save it someplace other than the two SATA drives because both drives would have to be re-formatted to suit the RAID coinfiguration, then you re-install Windows. ......