I am using an ASRock P4VM8 mainboard with the VIA VT 8237R chip. my bios version is 1.3. I have two two IDE hard drives and one IDE optical device working on the board. I am trying to add a third, sata hard disk but it is not detected by the system, not even in the bios. The hard disk is a samsung 160gb, i believe its sata 2(it has 3Gb/s on it). How do i get the hard disk working?

http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/P4VM8/

SPECS OF THE MOTHERBOARD..

There are 4 different connections for IDE on this board, so the Optical drive can use any of the 3 left after the hard drive, depending on your configuration. IDE uses a ribbon cable with 1 or 2 devices attached. A typical connection of 2 devices is 1 HD as Master and the second device (CD drive) as a Slave on a single cable. This leaves the second IDE open for expansion down the line.

You could also do 1 device per ribbon and leave as Cable select.

ftp://europe.asrock.com/manual/P4i45GV%20R5.0.pdf

no actual problem told, a vague, do not hot swap and HDD drive for sure IDE 4 pin power or blow up the drive you WILL
AC cord pulled from wall for 15min, min then work.
or IDE slave jumper set wrong, gee why in the world fool with IDE,
use SATA only !!!!
The bios must see the HDD or it is bad. cables, gee are $1 used.
only 1 cable is problematic in any real shop but if it looks ok
and ends not mess most IDE ribbon cables are good. 3M ribbon.


well you bought 2 old mobo and they failed, or the died in use after 11 years, 2006 o 2017, why not tell history or when it last worked perfect , I can buy endless mobo sure and and I can hack them ***** with bios updates done wrong 10 ways I sure CAN.
bolt dead smacks of not RTM read the manual for sure.

NO OS TOLD at all XP the virus magnet 2001 used in 2017/ what?
well that depends on the chipset of the mobo
and Am2 IS NOT Just one set.of chips it is many.
this is old old legacy Nforce chipset that fail if the chipset driver is not loaded first
did you RTM first,
k8m800 , this mobo manual? and VIA K8M800 too, thus the name above. 2006 sold .
chip set pain is so common, then, and forward in time.
for
VT8237R+ (this is IDE and Sata chip and must have a driver)
the rotten VIA makers chip set that as zero support at VIA.com

and ITE IT8705<< problem child #2 old.

not told you any drive model but uses IDE(PATA) or SATA1 drive.
wow so using super relic IDE drive,? 4 pin power , junk drives?
from 20 years old.? or 11 years old IDK.

most drives that old fail and in odd ways, testing any IDE drive is a super pain and 1 full day to run the diagnostic! NEVER USE IDE.
unless unemployed.

gee use only SATA drives and the test is 10 seconds labor, ask how. to run smart tests, on any sata drive.
step 1 is bios new coin cell battery and turn RAID off the chip above.
then the OS installer works.
here is the w7 driver,
https://www.via-drivers.com/download-VT8237-network-driver-for-Windows7-32bit.html

1: coin cell dead now 11 years old and you expect BIOS not to go made/ why?
2: bios settings wrong for sure disable raid. in bios. ,save , exit.
3: and hdd0 in boot order first or 2nd after DVD 1st.

In the Advanced Boot settings of the BIOS you will see a general boot order setting and then there are 2 others: for the order of the optical units and for the order of the hard disks.
Open the setting for the optical units and put the SATA one first - the IDE one is there first by default.

Once your powered on the CMOS battery is no longer an issue. If it isn't reading the IDE or SATA channels it could be because they are not set in the BIOS. Check your BIOS setting and double check your cable connections. You also need to make sure, for IDE devices, that one of the drives is set to Master and the other to Slave otherwise they confuse the board and cancel each other out.

This is common to other mainboards, the SATA controller have it's own BIOS, but it only works correctly using two identical SATA HD's at same time for data protection purposes. If you have a free PCI slot there are expansion cards based on VIA chipset VT6421 with 2 internal SATA ports, other external and one IDE. See one here

The ECS PM800-M2 only supports SATA 1.0 hard drives. If you are using a newer SATA 3.0 hard drive, there is a jumper on the hard drive which has to be set to SATA 1.0 in order for the VIA 8237R chipset southbridge (which Is on your ECS PM800-M2) to recognize the newer SATA 3.0 hard drives. This Is applicable to all motherboards with the Viatech PM800 / 8237R chipsets. Note: the location for the SATA 1.0 / 3.0 jumper varies on each brand of hard drives. Also check If SATA Is enabled In the BIOS and select IDE mode.

hello, go into the bios and set the sata+ide (hard-drive settings) configure it for bolth. exit and save settings-and it should reboot and see all drives. hope this helps! goodluck. please don't forget to rate this solution. if you need further help,reply. (f2 in post gets ito bios if you don't have the manual, be careful if you do not know what you are doing, you could make it worse) check cables+power.

near the interface port of the hard drive you have to put a jumper that limit the connection speed from 3.0giga per second to 1.5giga per second, I think that would solve the problem because the hard drive speed goes to 3 giga per second and the motherboard p4vm8 serial ata port can support up to 1.5giga per second.

use third party raid driver.use floppy drive for installation third party raid driver.