I'm a newbie.

I installed a third hard drive via a pci sata card since I had only 2 sata ports which were used by the primary drive and the dvd player. Now when the pc boots up I get a quick message "hitachi 120GB Hdd not configured" or something like that. I can access the drive just fine from Linux or WinXP. Also I can't find this drive on the bios cmos features screen. I see my ide drive on channel 0 and the primary drive and dvd player on sata channel's 1 and 2.

I thought it had to be in bios to use it. Also, the cmos features screen looks like it only has ide master/slave channels 1 and 2 and sata channels 1 and 2. Only 6 channels? Maybe this bios can't accept more than 2 sata channels?

Anyway, I'd like to add more sata hard drives if possible.

Hi there,

fine, that's nothing to be ashamed of - we all used to be.

That's not much of a surprise. Both Windows and Linux bring their own drivers along and "talk" to the HDD drives or their controllers using their own methods. They do not need any BIOS support. So it doesn't matter whether the drives are configured or even recognized by the BIOS.

BIOS recognition and support is only necessary for legacy OS's that use BIOS calls to access the HDDs, like DOS or Windows 9x when it's running a drive in "compatibility mode".

Yes and no. Many BIOSes only support what's actually integrated on the mainboard. If a board has two SATA connectors, the BIOS probably looks like it supports two. But add-on cards, like additional SATA controllers, often bring their own BIOS extension along, so that they not only add the actual hardware, but also BIOS support for it.

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks very much, Doc CPU! That clears up a lot of mysteries that I had.