I had trouble with my Samsung SP2004C harddrive (SATA2) and Abit NF7-S rev.2 motherboard (SATA1) as well. This worked for me: 1) On top of HD is a drawing of how to mount a jumper beside the SATA cable. In order to force HD to SATA1, just mount jumper. 2) Only enable SATA controller in BIOS, not SATA RAID ROM. 3) In BIOS i had to set SATA as a boot device, even though i only boot from another IDE HD. 4) Format with something like "Paragon Partition Manager v7.0". This needs 1 hour. I dont know if this is logic but as i said, it worked for me...