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- Jan 15, 2006
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I use mainly Dells for my business. I have a few diagnostic PCs that are all set up diagnosis only, with multiple cables for SCSI, SAS, SATA, and IDE connections. I use this to scan drives, diagnosis and imaging by plugging in the suspect drives tot he box. If you have temporary connections other than eSATA going to the motherboard itself, you may have noticed that you have to go into the BIOS to enable an SATA port prior to connecting it. This is a pain in the ass because if you disconnect it, and reboot the PC, you will notice that it probably hangs at the "Press F1... Press F2...", and will not get through boot post without user interaction.
Prior to moving forward, I would recommend updating your BIOS to the newest revision.
The workaround for this is if you have 4 SATA ports, connect 4 SATA devices (can also be a CD Rom if you do not have 4 hard drives) to ALL 4 ports. (or however many you have). Then power on and go into the BIOS. Be sure you remember any specific changes that you made to the BIOS prior. Go to "Maintenance" in BIOS. Select "Reset To Defaults". This will force all of the settings to reset and rescan the SATA bus for drives. Now that there are 4 devices, it allows those 4 ports to be used. Save and exit. The go right back into the BIOS and make any other changes BUT DO NOT CHANGE THE DRIVES THAT ARE ENABLED. Leave them alone. You can enable anything else, such as RAID, or Smart Reporting. Modify your other settings to be set like they were prior. Save and exit, and shut down. Disconnect your extra drives. start your PC and hopefully you will not tell you that you a drive cannot be found and to hit F1 or F2. If it boots, then shut your PC down once more, hook up another drive and boot. At this point you should see your operating system add the drivers for the additional drive, or you should see the drive in Hardware Manager or Disk Management. If you do, then you have successfully enabled Auto Detect.
Note, this procedure may also work for other venders such as HP, but I haven't tested it.
Prior to moving forward, I would recommend updating your BIOS to the newest revision.
The workaround for this is if you have 4 SATA ports, connect 4 SATA devices (can also be a CD Rom if you do not have 4 hard drives) to ALL 4 ports. (or however many you have). Then power on and go into the BIOS. Be sure you remember any specific changes that you made to the BIOS prior. Go to "Maintenance" in BIOS. Select "Reset To Defaults". This will force all of the settings to reset and rescan the SATA bus for drives. Now that there are 4 devices, it allows those 4 ports to be used. Save and exit. The go right back into the BIOS and make any other changes BUT DO NOT CHANGE THE DRIVES THAT ARE ENABLED. Leave them alone. You can enable anything else, such as RAID, or Smart Reporting. Modify your other settings to be set like they were prior. Save and exit, and shut down. Disconnect your extra drives. start your PC and hopefully you will not tell you that you a drive cannot be found and to hit F1 or F2. If it boots, then shut your PC down once more, hook up another drive and boot. At this point you should see your operating system add the drivers for the additional drive, or you should see the drive in Hardware Manager or Disk Management. If you do, then you have successfully enabled Auto Detect.
Note, this procedure may also work for other venders such as HP, but I haven't tested it.
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