Hard Drive Help Needed

PostHard Drive Help Needed by **Rightey** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 5:22 am

Last night I reformatted my computer, and re-installed Windows XP everything went OK, except now I can't see my second hard drive.

I have two hard drives on my PC, one newer 80GB SATA, and an older 20gb IDE (at least I think that's what it is, it's the older type that predates SATA that uses the very large connector cable).

Anyways the older 20GB is the secondary drive, and the newer one is the primary C drive where windows was installed. However the smaller 20gb does not show up, not in the device manager, and not even in the disk management window where a new unformatted hard drive would normally show up.

I'm playing around with Ubuntu right now and it shows up in this, so does anyone have any ideas how to detect it in Windows?

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **Green Gecko** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 5:36 am

You may just need to install the disk controller drivers for your motherboard. They're not all included on the XP set up disk although more recent copies of XP and particularly Win7 are better for this.

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **Rightey** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 2:00 pm

Good call, it was the RAID drivers that were missing, once those were installed the second hard drive was found automatically. Thanks GG.

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **Green Gecko** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 9:10 pm

Yeah sometimes the RAID/IDE/SATA drivers all get bundled together so you need them even if you don't use a RAID array. Also they seem to group together interfaces more efficiently in Device Manager then the default XP drivers if they do happen to be compatible with your rig.

Installing IDE drivers can enable Ultra DMA mode as well for faster transfer speeds. It's worth just downloading everything from the OEM site.

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **~Earl Grey~** » Sat Jun 19, 2010 3:21 am

Yeah I've got a Western Digital Raptor full of stuff that, since reinstalling XP, I've not been able to access. Even though I've installed the official drivers, for some reason my desktop system refuses to see it. I realise that's of no help to your predicament, but maybe it's good to know you're not alone in being screwed on the whole SATA thing.

It sucks dick....

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **Green Gecko** » Sun Jun 20, 2010 3:00 am

Have you tried replacing the SATA cable? I had one go lose/wear down for some reason so the hard disk stopped showing up.

PostRe: Hard Drive Help Needed by **Rightey** » Tue Jun 22, 2010 6:11 am

I had problems when I first installed the drives, as the IDE one is older, I had originally intended it to stay the primary drive, and then just have the SATA as the secondary. however after many hours of trying it just refused to see it, finally I tried the reverse and it worked. Maybe if you tried changing the positions of the drives that would help?

Hard Drive Help Needed

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