Ok, I just recently bought a Hitachi 250gig SATA to put in as a secondary HD. My main HD is a Western Digital 80gig SATA. Installation went just fine and the second drive is recognized in the BIOS but when windows loads it doesn't show up anywhere for me to use it. I have an ASROCK K8 Combo Z motherboard and it uses the Ali RAID manager program. I don't want to mess with Raiding the drives together. Is it possible to just have to two drives working seperately or do I HAVE to Raid them? I also tried updating the BIOS for the board but I'm having trouble making the boot disk because of the way the BOOT.ini file has to be edited for SCSI disks and the way microsoft words the instructions is very confusing. Here's the link to their instructions. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305595&sd=tech The part that I'm confused with is this.... If your computer starts from a SCSI hard drive, you may need to replace the multi(0) entry with scsi(0). If you are using scsi(x) in the Boot.ini file, copy the correct device driver for the SCSI controller in use on the computer to the root of the setup disk, and then rename it Ntbootdd.sys. Change the disk(0) number to represent the SCSI-ID of the hard drive you want to start to. If you are using multi(x) in the Boot.ini file, you do not need to do this. I'm not sure what they mean by the SCSI-ID. I've looked everywhere for that. Anyways, I'm hoping that just updating the BIOS will help my computer recognize my HD. What I don't understand though is that if I go under my hardware settings and look at the disk drives both the HD's show up there, I just can't use that new one. Someone's help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks!
Please check the jumper setting. How did you set the jumper on the new drive?? What is the jumper setting on the original C drive/WD 80GB?? Let us know.
The WD80 is still set up as the master drive with the jumpers. However, what's weird is this second drive doesn't even have jumper pins...just the SATA power plug in, the regular serial plug in that goes to the MOBO and a regular power plug slot.
if shows in the bios & device manager, than drive needs to be partitioned so it can be accessed normally
agree with ddp and haim, please partition the puppy and let us know. I had the same symptoms as you with a Dell desktop; those drives are usually jumped CSEL; so, once I jumped the new one as CSEL it showed up nicely and was able to access it; that's why I was asking about the jumper. However, I used this as a primary boot drive and had windows xp install do the format and partition for me.
