Second Hard disk setup.

[lidds6841]

Can someone please advise me on setting up the Bios to accept a second hard disk Its driving me mad trying to configure it. The motherboard is a Gigabyte 78LMT-usb3. At the moment I have two cd rom drives that are connected on the IDE ribbon cable connector and a 500Gb Toshiba Hard drive connected to SATA port 0, all works fine.
I want to use an 160Gb Seagate hard disk Ive got lying around as storage for all my photos.
When I connect the Drive to SATA port 1 and go into bios it does not recognise that the drive is there and takes the PC longer than normal to boot. Why is in not seeing the drive. and am I correct in thinking that you don't need to set jumpers to slave and master for SATA drives.??

[rinkol]

When I connect the Drive to SATA port 1 and go into bios it does not recognise that the drive is there and takes the PC longer than normal to boot. Why is in not seeing the drive. and am I correct in thinking that you don't need to set jumpers to slave and master for SATA drives.??

Does the drive have power? There is a separate power connection.

One could swap SATA cables and ports to rule these out as potential problems.

There may be a jumper to select the SATA performance mode - look this up on the Seagate web site. However, I think your motherboard is new enough that this should not affect functionality.

You could try the disk out either in another computer having an SATA interface or using a USB to SATA interface as is found in typical external drives. It is quite possible that something is wrong with the second drive - the amazing thing in my mind is that these things actually work.

[shadowsports]

Took a quick peek at this yesterday.  Are your SATA ports set as AHCI?  I understand you are using the IDE connection for CD/DVD.

So ensure the SATA ports are configured as AHCI, And SATA ports set as type...  Moving the second disk (160GB) to ports 5 or 6 above may also help.  Now the caveat, if you had the Toshiba (500GB) set to IDE Mode instead of AHCI when windows 7 was installed, you may have issues booting after changing the southbridge controller's operate mode from IDE "emulate" to AHCI.  Give us an update about this and we'll try and help you move forward. 

[lidds6841]

Hi Thanks for the replies ,
                                     Yes I have read about trying the AHCI setting which I tried but windows did boot but then I got a Blue screen telling me that there was a problem with the boot disk. I have read that windows needs to be configured to use the AHCI setting during the installation process. Is this correct or can it be reconfigured in windows after installation has been completed?

[shadowsports]

I thought that might be an issue for you.  The operate mode can be changed without the need to reinstall windows.  This link should help.  Please read the "More Information" section at the bottom of the page.  It explains why a registry modification is necessary.  Its an easy one.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/922976 

Apologies I somehow deleted a portion of my first post where I mentioned that no master / slave relationship exists with SATA.  While the ports are for a single disk configuration, sometimes ports will share bandwidth if only a single PCIe lane exists.  This is more common with secondary or supplementary controllers.  It doesn't apply here.  Just a marketing tactic.   

rinkol's mention of setting jumpers refers to auto speed negotiation.  This was a problem for a brief period after SATA II was released.  SATA 3gb disks were not properly detected on first gen SATA I (1.5) controllers.  Hard disk manufacturers employed a jumper setting that forced the SATA II disks to operate at SATA I spec.  He's right.  Doesn't apply here.