Thanks for the suggestions, Charles. I am not completely clueless <g>. I have tried all those things, many times. The BIOS simply does not recognize the drive. When I try to tell it there is one, it basically replies, "No there's not." Could be a bum drive but given the number of SATA(N) setup issues I found on the net, probably not.

It's probably like many things -- once you've done it successfully once it's easy. That first time is the tricky part.

The drive only cost me 80 bucks. (For a terabyte -- truly amazing how cheap they have become). I don't have to put a very high value on my time to back up seven steps and punt at this point.

The new new plan is to make a hardware move at the end of summer. I can limp along with what I have until then. My six month contract, originally due to end this past Friday, was just extended for another three. I was also told that will be it. This from the highest level, so high up the VP of IT reports to him. The client (I keep wanting to say we) sells heart monitors as its primary product and Medicare slashed reimbursement rates for that product and related services by 30% last year. They have been keeping the purse strings welded shut since then. If the in-house application I am helping support had not had such a backlog of bugs and enhancement requests I never would have gotten in the door in the first place. Anyway, come Labor Day I expect to be out of work again. Maybe financial realities will talk me out of it but at that point I want to go whole hog with .NET, even if it's slow going for a while. I don't ever want to work with a schlock VFP legacy app again and don't want my career -- if it can even be called that any more -- to be akin to perpetually hanging to a ledge by my fingertips.

>You sound like me with cars <g> HD a bit easier. Attach SATA cable to drive and motherboard. Attach power to drive. Boot computer. That's pretty much it. Is the bios screen on boot not showing you the drive? Try going to the BIOS menu ( f2 or f10 or something on boot ) and see if the computer sees it at all. If it's there, go to My Computer, right click, Manage, and go to the hard drive manager. Maybe it is trying to assign it to a letter already covered by a network mapping.
>
>If it didn't come formatted, the manager is also where you can format it. Us NTFS even if it is already formatted FAT.
>
>>>>I am thinking of buying a new desktop machine and looking for recommendations. The main app will be Visual Studio so I want something with some horsepower. Unfortunately I do not have unlimited budget. Looking for great bang for the buck, I guess you could put it. Something that can make VS boogie without breaking the bank.
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>>>Here's what I've been doing several times for the last ten years (three times my box, twice daughters'): get someone who knows the latest motherboards, to recommend a configuration. Then go on Newegg and buy what the guy says (including the latest power supply unit - which are pretty much the only thing you can't use twice, they always change something to make them incompatible). Get your best old tower case and fit these together when the parts arrive. It's about three hours with just a screwdriver. I got a fairly fast machine now, 4G RAM, 3-core Athlon, and it cost me $400 (add $160 for a total of 1.6T in disks, which I bought separately, one before and one after). The greatest saving was on the video card, which was just a $60 or so, no fan (club) or other fancy stuff, this is no gaming machine. And it looks really nice now... see picture.
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>>>If I can do it, so can you.
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>>You have entirely too much faith in my hardware expertise. I have been dubbing around throughout May just trying to install a SATA(N) drive and still haven't gotten the machine to acknowledge its presence. Enough of that tomfoolery. The economic theory of comparative advantage goes back nearly 200 years and seems no less true today. Dubbing around with this drive has convinced me my time is better invested elsewhere.
>>
>>Anyone who could use a perfectly good WD Caviar Green drive, 1 TB, give me a shout. Good as new, never been used.