My brother has reformatted his PC and put windows XP back on. The drive that windows is on is IDE (C drive). Since reformatting the PC his second hard drive which is a SATA drive is not being recognised. It is not being recognised in the BIOS either. All the cables are correct.

What do I need to do to get windows to recognise the SATA drive? The SATA drive contains important information that cannot be lost so the fix cannot including reformatting the drive.

Motherboard = Chaintech 7NJS

SATA drive = Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 model ST380013A8

The PC does not have a floppy drive. Has a CD player and DVD re-writer.

If the BIOS is no longer recognising the SATA drive, it seems doubtful that it was the reinstallation of windows that caused its disappearance, or indeed that windows is anything to do with it.

It's far more likely this has been caused by playing around with the BIOS. In order to maintain backwards compatibility BIOS's offer three basic SATA modes (with slightly different names, depending on the manufacturer). Different configurations allow compability modes where SATA drives may not actually be initialised, or enhnaced modes where an ACHI driver is required.

How is mass storage configured in the BIOS?