What is the problem here!? mobo/hdd/psu!?

[codyray10]

This is driving me absolutely insane. My computer, refuses to recognize two hard drives being plugged in simultaneously. It's taken me three rma's to start to think its probably not the hard drives that are the real issue here. I just received my third WD Black 500gb rma drive. I had been using a single raptor 150gb drive. I planned on using acronis just to clone my raptor drive to the new 500gb drive. However, when I plug the second hdd in (black 500gb) at first it took windows roughly 6 minutes to completely boot windows 7. Even then, once it finally booted windows would not find the 500gb. I checked device manager as well as the diskmgmt.msc tool, but to no avail. I powered off, unplugged the raptor and tried the 500gb by itself. Popped in my windows 7 media in and it recognized it just fine. Installed windows, powered down and plugged the raptor back in, in hopes to get a boot loader for the two installs. Of course, it only sees one drive. Then thinking maybe the newly received 500gb drive was another dud, I tried two different 80gb drives that I know work. Again, windows doesn't either one. I've tried multiple sata cables and switched around sata port combinations, still nothing. This has happened before, I just assumed it was a bad hdd, but I highly doubt all three drives I have received back from WD are all bad, none of them were labeled as recertified either. Unfortunately I don't have another mobo or psu to swap out to see if one of those are the culprit. ANY help is greatly appreciated!

Also while I'm here, my copy of Windows 7 is an upgrade. When I first installed it, I used the "custom install" and did a clean install that way. When I just tried to do that same method a little bit ago, windows wouldnt activate saying that this product key could only be used for upgrades and not clean installs. Did microsoft come up with a way to block this method? I had no problems doing so before, and know of others who did the same when W7 was initially released. *

*SIGH...again any input would be great, Thanks

 

[Pederv]

Have you tried resetting the bios? I've found that sometimes resetting the bios fixes strange symptoms.
Did you check for a bios update? Maybe this is a known issue for a certain bios revision.

 

[vshah]

have you verified that each sata port is working individually?

does that motherboard have a secondary sata controller? have you tried attaching the drive to that instead of the primary southbridge?

it could be a power supply issue, but if 15w for a hard drive was pushing you over the limit i would image there would be other symptoms as well (crashes while playing games for example).

 

[codyray10]

I have tried completely resetting bios to "optimized defaults" as well as resetting the cmos. I have not yet tried each sata port individually, I will be sure to test that when I get home later this afternoon. Haven't done any gaming on the computer since I have been waiting for my RMA. As of my most recent experiences, I have not had any crashing. I've been considering funding a new build as of late so I'm going to start ordering some parts. That should help me rule out some things, being able to swap parts out.