Why won't my computer "see" my ATA drive?

I've got an asus a7v133a MB and used to have an 80 pin shielded cable plugged into the primary ATA drive, which was also plugged into my maxtor ATA100 drive. I recently reloaded the OS (win2000) and because I didn't have the 80 pin cable, I used a 40 pin cable and had to plug it into the primary IDE plug on the MB. Having recently found the 80 pin, I tried plugging that into the drive and the ATA slot on the MB, and BIOS won't detect the drive. Is it because I installed the OS while the 40 pin was installed?? I thought I could just change cables at will, but apparently not. Thanks.

Is the drive detected during POST? If yes, what is the exact wording of the error that you are getting?

If BIOS/POST isn't detecting it, then it's a jumper issue. Make sure you have it correct.

No, during BIOS the message says: Primary ATA not detected, then at the next screen under "Primary" it says "None". Also, why would the jumper be wrong, since I've used this MB, drive and cable in the past? The only thing different about this computer is I'm using a generic floppy and CD Rom from a different computer.

I mean your harddrive jumper. you added a cdrom drive so that may have bumped your hdd to slave or master, etc.

adjust your hdd jumpers accordingly.

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mean your harddrive jumper

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yes, that's what I meant too. The CD ROM is plugged into the secondary IDE slot on the MB, which is how I had this set up before and everything worked. The only difference is that I'm using a different CD ROm drive and floppy then was previously installed, which I wouldn't think would matter. For now, I've got the 80 pin HD cable plugged into the primary IDE slot, but I want to take advantage of the ATA, but this is when i run into problems.

If the POST isn't detecting the drive, then something is wrong. I would start by trying a different cable. You could also do a CMOS clear to force everything back to defaults and have it redetect things like your drives.