I bought a new hard drive yesterday. I want to use it as an external drive and connected it to a set of cables designed for this purpose. The cables will work with IDE or SATA drives depending on how you connect them and then connect to the computer via USB. The IDE connections have worked fine in the past but this is my first time trying it with a SATA drive.

The PC recognized it and I partionned it with Acronis True Image as the website instructed me to. Now the PC sometimes recognizes it and tells me to format it but cannot complete the format. Other times it does not recognize the drive at all. Any suggestions on what to do next? Some info on the web suggests setting the BIOS to Auto Discover the drives if possible but I haven't found that option in the BIOS setup. I may try it on another one of my PCs and keep my fingers crossed.