AsRock Z77 Extreme 4 - HDD not recognized

[OneSneakyMofo]

Hey all,

I put together my first PC since 2001 yesterday. After a few hours of troubleshooting and tinkering, I finally got everything set up. To my dismay, when I was about to install Windows 7, it said that there were no HDDs recognized. I checked the BIOS to look at the SATA ports to be recognized, and it only recognized one - my Blu-ray drive - and not both SATA. Does anyone have any suggestions?

The hard drive whirs for one second, then doesn't, then does again, etc. I have also tweaked some settings in the BIOS underneath the Advance tab at the top (checking to make sure I was set to SATA instead of IDE, stuff like that) as well as swapping out SATA cables and trying different ports. I only have the one HDD until tomorrow so I can't see if the HDD is dead.

Any help is appreciated.

P.S. The HDD was bout two years ago; it is completely unused but it has been moved around since then. Not sure if that would cause the problem.

[profJim]

Can you test your hard drive in another system to see if it works.
If it does work, see if Hitachi has some diagnostic software that will thoroughly test your hard drive.
I recommend installing windows with your ssd as the only installed drive. Obviously it's OK to have a cd/dvd drive installed.
Once the o/s install is complete, then you should installed any other drives.

[OneSneakyMofo]

No, I do not have another computer that I can try. I guess I will wait it out tomorrow until my SSD is here so I can test it.