Hey, I really hope someone can help me with this. I just bought a second SATA HDD. I hooked it up and installed my OS. Everything worked fine. Then I hooked up a my second HDD and the bottom half of my screen was black. I have narrowed the problem down to hooking up the power cable to the second hard drive. The second HDD had two different kinds of power cord hook-ups, I tried both and neither worked.
Please help me. Here's a list of stats if it will help.

Windows XP SP2
2.9 GHZ Processor
1 GHZ Ram
450 Watt PSU
256 Mb Video Card, Radeon X-1900 AIW
Primary HDD is 500GB Seagate
Secondary HDD is 160GB WDWild guess - it's the power suppply.

IF either drive works but both do not, then the issue MAY be power. There could be a controller/resource issue here. Are you trying to plug the drive in while the system is on? SATA can do this, but your system has to be configured to allow it.

You'll probably be wanting to carefully inspect this behaviour in the BIOS. Is the screen affected there too? If so, you know this isn't a windows problem...

Hope that gave you some ideasI have had problems with a few of the 80 and 160 gig WD SATA1.5& 3.Mb/s Drives.
I always had to use the Adapter to the molex power connection, bcs it wouls not boot on regular molex hooked straight to the L side power inlet. Also on a few I got thos click sounds that indicate your driver is almost THRU driving

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index.asp

But Western Dig has the best return policy I have seen.
MAKE sure your drive is reg in the link above and send it to them for repair or replacement for free if its under 3 yrs old.
Doesnt matter who's name it's in either...

PS: This info will help you if your HDD is bad!

Here is a tech link describing your problem and maybe a solution.

Link EditThank-you very much for your help so far.

Here's some more info if this will help. When I boot up the computer the screen is full, but as soon as windows begins to log on the screen goes half black. On my second drive, the WD one, there is two different power ports. I have tried both, and neither work.

The whole reason I had bought the new Seagate drive was because I was having some problems with the WD drive, but this problem really doesn't seem related. It seems to be solely a power issue because the problem happens even without the SATA cable hooked up to the WD drive.
One more question btw. Would it be worth trying the power from by disc drives as I know these work without problems?If you replace the PSU let know..bcs IM thinking I need to go to a 600W+. So I can hook my second drive back up (the PSU I have now is a 420W) Had the same problm. That may be why I had to replace mine and the molex power on the L side still doesnt work.
If I understand your question do you mean reload the WinXP OS? to one of the drivesIf it were a problem with PSU wouldn't my boot screens show as half black as well? The screen doesn't go half black until windows log on screen starts to load.litespeed, To my above question concerning trying power from my disc drives. What I meant was unplug the power to my cd drive and plug into my second HDD. I assume the problem would persist but havent tried it yet.Im not sure you have a hardware problm just yet, I have had this problem before building a computer with a 160gb seagate baracuda and WD 160 gb also, let me find my notes and see what I done, maybe someone else will come along shortly. Until then Ill look this up for you cause I didnt have the monitor problm. just the same on with the WD HDDI dont think that would help the WD HDD! Altho u can try it real quick to be sure, elimination is part of the troubleshooting
Okay let me see if I got this right: Your Primary Master HDD is the WD drive?
Also when you said you had the SATA cable unplugged did you mean the power & did you leave the data cable plugged in on the WD Drive? Because I believe you have an issue with the WD HDD and a problem with video settingsor software.My primary drive is Seagate 500 GB, Secondary drive is 160 GB WD Drive. If I leave the data cable unplugged, the problem still happens. All I have to do is plug power into the WD Drive and half the screen goes black. I havent tried to plug it in while the computer is turned on though, is this safe to do?Okay do you have your jumpers set right on both drives Seagate PriMaster and the WD PriSlave, also in CMOS they need to be set on AUTO under Pri Mast& Pri Slave. Any other that ur not using turn to NONE..Chk your boot structure also. 1=disk#, 2=cdrom, 3=floppy or whatevr...I wouldnt hook up the HDD to your system while its running right now. Even tho the HDD is prob Hot Swapable..let me know what happens
 If you can, try swapping out the x1900 for a cheap card and see if the problem persists. After all, this is a video problem.

Also, unplugging the other hardware you know works but is not necessary for operation (optical drives, peripherals without plugs, any thing but your two HDs) you can diagnose if you suddenly get the picture then.

Is this an LCD monitor? If you have a CRT available, does that have the same result?

This still sounds LIKE a power problem to me...

litespeed14

If they are both SATA there aren't jumpers, masters or slave drives...but BIOS could easily be the solution here.

By the way, are both these drives recognized in Windows?