Charles, this is awesome. The SATA drive is now recognized. I can't even quite explain what the secret was but here are my likeliest suspects.

1. Power supply not connected. I read a lot of admonitions about connecting a SATA drive to more than one power supply. As you know, there is a funky looking power connector on a SATA drive in addition to the traditional 4 pronged connector. Fortunately enough, I had an adapter on hand from my experiments which connects the funky connection to a 4 prong connection. I thought maybe it was like USB devices which don't need traditional power connections. (OK, maybe I'm an idiot).

2. Outdated drivers. Eventually I successfully connected the SATA drive to a PCI card from Silicon Image. (The motherboard never did recognize it). The disc that came with the card had drivers only through XP, and their inscrutable <g> web site did not seem to offer anything for Windows 7.

Sincerely, thank you for your help and your perseverance. We are alike in that regard -- can't stand writing something off as unknowable.

Next time you are in Chicago, I owe you lunch. That would be the case anyway but this will be an official excuse.

>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.
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>If it didn't come formatted, the manager is also where you can format it. Us NTFS even if it is already formatted FAT.
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>>>>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.
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>>Anyone who could use a perfectly good WD Caviar Green drive, 1 TB, give me a shout. Good as new, never been used.