[Rick Kirby]

Hello all!

I have spent hours searching here and other places on the Internet without finding my answers. I am redoing a neighbor's Dell Dimension 4600. He gave me his Service Tag number and I looked up how it was originally configured. It came with an 80GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM memory. Since the info showed that it was a SATA hard drive... I ordered a 500GB SATA hard drive to replace it thinking I would use the original 80GB drive as a slave for extra storage.


Well... I got the desktop yesterday and found that it had an IDE hard drive instead of a SATA hard drive. I guess I didn't read well enough. It has an IDE BUT the SATA drive is supported as it has a SATA 0 and a SATA 1 connector! So... I went ahead and used the original connectors and moved the 80GB to the front bay and installed the 500GB in the original bay. I also went ahead and upgraded the RAM from 512MB to 2GB. I knew I would have to play around in the BIOS to get this setup to work. But here is where I am stuck.

After installing everything (With the new drive on SATA #0) I set the SATA master to AUTO and the IDE slave to AUTO. I can get the SATA hard drive to be recognized as a Hitachi 500GB drive but I can't see the original Maxtor 80GB drive! I have the jumper on the Maxtor set to CSL but have also tried removing the jumper entirely. I have read that it works both ways. (Different articles on the Net.)

So... How do I do this? I am stumped and don't know how to get around this. The easy way would be to return the SATA drive for an IDE but I got it online and don't want to wait for the swap. I have read so many conflicting things that I am utterly confused! Some say you can, some that you can't... Some say I need drivers, some say I don't.

I went ahead and reinstaled the original RAM thinking maybe I had a bad stick. Same issues!

Is there a way to make this work?

The Dimension 4600 has two DVD drives and a floppy. If you need the service tag number to help... Please let me know.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Rick