Dell Dimension 4700 SATA Port 0 doesn't recognize anything

[Sam05]

I got a Dell 4700 with a 80GB Serial ATA a couple of years back. My old Dell has two SATA ports, one of which has never been used before. I had recently bought a new DVD drive that uses SATA not IDE and discovered it wont register it, or anything else i try plug to it. I have even updated the BIOS to latest version but still its not working for me. Can any body tell em that why does my Dell Dimension 4700 SATA Port 0 doesn't recognize anything on it? Does any body knows about it? Kindly provide me the correct solution for the above issue.

[T.J.]

Try installing XP without the F6 drivers first. If that's successful, install Matrix drivers after XP is installed. If your computer does require a SATA driver, which I do not belive it does, but if it did, you would get it off the dell disk that came with your computer or from Dell's support website, you would press F6 right as the windows setup begins.

[Rawko]

The SATA driver has to be installed where you would be prompt something like, 'Press F6 to install third-party drivers." That's what you need to do. The SATA driver from Dell is probably on a separate disk. My problem turned out not to be the SATA drive at all, but a bad stick of RAM. I removed the RAM one stick at a time and tried reloading Windows XP.

[deoWo]

Before going for conclusion, you need to check out the following:

1. Check out whether the DVD drive has power on it.
2. You should used the right cable for the SATA connection and it's plugged in the right way.
3. You have tried connecting your devices that are connected to port 1 to port 0 to see if it would work. It doesn't work on your pc.
4. Then the DVD drive would actually work on port 1.

In this case, I would say your controller is broken. Since the controller is most likely on your mainboard, you can either get a new mainboard or a new SATA controller.