2 SATA ports – new HDD on port 0, and SATA optical drive on port 1
I recently installed a WD3200AAKX drive in the above system, left the jumpers alone, partitioned & formatted the drive with XP installation disc, then installed XP Pro. Everything is fine except the HDD activity light stays on all the time. There is no sluggishness or unresponsiveness, and Widows Explorer & Drive Management look normal. I unplugged the optical drive and tried the the HDD in port 1, and still the light remained on steadily. The BIOS shows nothing at IDE 1 & 2 Primary or secondary, and shows the HDD at IDE 3. I assume I’m overlooking something, but is it a jumper problem or something else?
did you check in the bios to see if you have your sata ports enabled? also you might try disabling your eide ports. did you by any chance set up the motherboard as well? if so check the manual and make sure you have the hard drive activity indicator connected correctly on the board.
I’ve checked the BIOS several times along with reading over the mobo manual, and the SATA ports are definitely enabled. I have not however, checked if the eide ports were disabled – I’ll do that next. As to the indicator light connection to the mobo, that appears and feels normal, and has been connected for about 5 years, and was connected by the computer shop I bought it from. Thanks for the reply Wayne
In the BIOS, the primary & secondary master & slave drives are shown as “Not Detected”. Inside each, all items are shown as set to “Auto” except “32 Bit Transfer” which is set to “Disabled” Same with the 3rd & 4th Primary devices. Under 4th Primary device, I changed “Type” from “Auto” to “CDROM”.
unfortunately, I don’t know what else it might be other than one of the case wires got plugged in reversed. I would double check the case to motherboard wiring again and make sure that one of the little wires isn’t plugged in backwards. you’ll find all that in the motherboard manual.
