Cannot See HDD during OS Setup - Clevo m7700 D9T D9K

[SKIPPY PB]

I diagnosed one of these Alienware m7700 laptops and have it functional after sourcing and replacing the graphics card, it now boots and can enter the bios and such.

They come with dual IDE hard drives in a RAID format from the factor. I don't have any spare IDE laptop hard drives to use with this laptop at the moment. Also 2.5" IDE HDDs seem to be getting harder to find aswell, atleast those with some decent volume. So I picked up a SATA cable to be able to use a SATA hard drive. I also picked up a 320GB 2.5" HDD for <$15. I set the drive controller to ATA instead of RAID in the bios (only two options.)

When I boot up the PC it goes through some system checks it seems, and it says SATA378... detecting.... then shows Toshiba.... which is the company of the HDD and was not there before.

From my research it seems you should need a driver to use this equipment since it is not factory. However would it display SATA378 on the start up screen if there is no driver installed?

Also if the bios is detecting the HDD, is there something else wrong?

Also if I try to install Windows 7 32-bit. Can I use a Windows XP driver with it. I can't find any Win7 drivers and I doubt they made any seeing that these computers are so old.


I found this thread confirming theres atleast some merrit to the driver issue.
http/www.tomsguide.com/forum/84699-35-alienware-d900t-recognize


I do have another m7700 exact same model although the production date aswell as some internal components are mostlikely different. However I pulled the hard drive on that one which has Windows 7 Alienware Edition installed on a 100GB IDE Hard drive. When I put that HDD with the connector into the one I just fixed it starts right up and I took it as far as the desktop then told it to shut down. So I am assuming that the hardware is good on the problem PC and it doens't have a fried motherboard or chipset or anything like that.


Anything I should check out?

 

[SKIPPY PB]

Apparently something else is up. That was a fresh install attempt of Windows XP and Windows 7. After swapping the IDE hard drive with the Windows 7 Alienware Software it worked. So I used some other tools I have and cloned the IDE hard drive onto the toshiba SATA i just got and its working now. But its still not answering my question as to why it worked out like such.