I just built a new system. I've had a multitude of problems, most of which I've handled myself, but this one has me stumped.

I brought both of my internal hard drives over from my old system. I had to delete the old partitions on both and start new ones. I have loaded windows Xp onto my most efficient drive(the bigger faster one, Maxtor 250gb), and planned on using my 80gb Seagate(ST380011A) as the slave spare drive.

Well I accidentally put Seagate on the master end of the wire jumpered on cable select, with Maxtor jumpered on slave on the slave part of the wire; all prior to installing windows. I selected to have windows installed on Maxtor of course, but it was jumpered on slave I found out later.

When I looked in My Computer, I noticed that my spare hard drive(master) was nowhere to be found. There was only one drive letter under hard disk drives. This is when I found out the orientation of the drives and fixed it, jumpering both on cable select and reversing the drives' places on the ribbon. Problem is, my spare hard drive is still not listed in My Computer after the fix. It(ST380011A) is listed under Device Manager as working properly, but I have no way to access or store files on it. It is also listed correctly in the BIOs. I heard somewhere that it probably needs to be reformatted, but how do I do that without installing Windows on it, and I can't even access it? It's only 80 gb, but that space is always useful for something.

Go to Start...Run...and type in "diskmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Find the 80 gB drive and right click on it to partition and format it.

I've never heard of anyone using one drive on cable select and one on slave, but it probably works. I would try using them both as master + slave, or both cable select prior to reformatting.

You can also download Disk management tools from segate/maxtor (same company now) and boot to the disk tools and format it that way. If you can't do it through windows

It worked with diskmgmt.msc, before both my drives just went bust! I think this f-ing up the jumpers has caused a corruption in my drives, neither one are responding after being loaded with windows! I just went out and got a SATA drive, my first one. One of these days, I'll put the drives back in and run tools on them to see what's wrong and if they can be fixed. Right now, my computer's running smooth on the new drive. One question though, I know nothing about raid. I have my drive settings at non-RAID in BIOS. Should I set them to RAID? This has never been an issue with me before, I just decided my next hard drive should be a much faster one.

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html. I used this to set up my first raid array. It will answer your question.

I only have one SATA drive. RAID really does not sound worth it, my drive does everything it should and more compared to the IDE drives that I've used. I've already seen faster data transfer.