Recently I went to install a second hard drive into a Dell Inspiron 531. It currently had an existing hard drive and DVD drive already installed on SATA 0 and SATA 1. I figured simple enough, add a SATA cable to SATA 2, plug the other end into the new drive, plug in the power and all would be happy. To my surprise, I checked the BIOS and it showed only the devices in SATA 0 and 1. What should have been easy was now going to require some Googling. In searching around a came across this form post. Half way down posted by someone named HP_HP was the answer, SATA 2 and 3 are not enabled by default. The steps HP_HP gave
Go to BIOS
Select Advanced,
Select Seriel-ATA Configuration, hit enter
look on SATA Controller, I am sure it would be SATA-1 on your setting.
Change it to SATA-1+2
Save and Exit..
worked like a charm. After changing the setting, the drive was detected and worked with out any further problems.
