Hi,

I have installed a new HD into one of our (2 year old-XP) gaming machines here, and since it is a SATA, I installed a SATA adaptor into a PCI slot. I hooked up the SATA cable from adaptor to drive, and all the appropriate power connectors. I installed the drivers, but I can't see the new drive in "My Computer". The CD had RAID software which put some icon on the Task Bar, and when I click on that, it sees the drive in all its glory, but I can't configure it at all. I don't even want a "RAID" arrangement, just to use the new drive as an additional drive for more storage.

BTW, when I go into "SETUP", I can't change the setting for "Primary SATA drive".

Also, there is a ribbon cable type connector on the SATA adaptor. Does this have to get connected? I hope not since the reason I needed it in the first place was due to not having anymore IDE resources.

Can someone point me in the right direction here?


Thanks,

Vin

well if u configured it in a way that RAID is workin then of course u wont see the HD when u go to my computer.

Thank you for replying. I didn't configure anything. I simply put the CD in and allowed it to load. If I go into SETUP, as I said it doesn't allow me to do anything.

Does anyone have any ideas on this one? I don't want to use this drive in a RAID configuration, I simply want it to be an ADDITIONAL drive. I installed a SATA PCI adaptor, and hooked up the SATA cable from the adaptor to the drive. Does the adaptor communicate with the machine via the PCI bus, or do I have to connect an IDE ribbon to it? Since this new drive is well over 137 GB, is there anything special I need to do to with BIOS?

HELP!

Vin

right click my computer/manage

does disk management see the drive?

I am not near the machine now. Let me do that later today and i will get back to you. Thank you both for taking the time to reply.

When I right click on My Computer, and select "Manage", I get a "Computer Management" screen. I then click on the Disc Management, and YES I see the new drive as well as the old one and the CD and DVD drives. The existing disc shows up as Disc 0, and the new one shows up as "Disc 1" with a white horizontal bar inside of a red circle, and it says "Unknown", although it knows it is a 238 GB drive, and it says "not initialized".

Any ideas?

good news. just use disk management to create a partition or 2 and format them ntfs

Hi and thanks for the post.

I think I tried to do just that (initialized using disk management), and i could not. Is there some way to go about it that may not be intuitively obvious?

Thanks,

Vin

http://web.mymediagear.com/Portals/2/Parti...ndFormat-XP.pdf

try this

It worked!!!

Thank you all for all of your ideas. I plodded my way through the disc management thing, and eventually figured out the correct keystroke sequence to initialize, and ultimately partition. I now show 238 or so GB drive on My Computer.


Thanks again. You were all very helpful.

Vin