Maxtor HDD troubles

[francescopadormo]

Hello!

I've recenbtly built a new computer. I intended to use RAID, with two maxtor 80G HDDs. However this didn't materialize (due to my incompetence). XP is now up and running, however despite both drives being plugged in only one is shown in My Computer.

I understand that there's probably a multitude of reasons why this is the case, so if anyone could point me in the right direction to solving the problem I would really appreciate it!

Thanks!

 

[kittle]

where are the 2 drives plugged in? -- if its a RAID controller, then that might be why they dont show up.

Do both drives show up in the bios? if not - something isnt hooked up properly. Drag out the manuals and see what they say.

go into windows disk manager and see if your 2nd drive shows up there. if so, its just a matter of formatting it.

 

[francescopadormo]

They're not in a raid array, the second device isn't even being seen (by device manager or computer manager)! The cables arent faulty, and neither are the sata ports (ive tried swapping them around).

So would the problem be with bios? I looked in my bios and couldnt see anything too useful: any tips? Also i installed raid drivers at the beginning of the xp installation: do i need to perhaps get a raid controller, or uninstall them?

Or could the hdd output port be faulty?

Thanks for your reply!

 

[weilin]

Assuming your OS is installed on a IDE drive, chances are, windows doesnt have the sata drivers (sata kinda went mainstream after XP came out). so there is a chance that you may have to format to give XP the drivers it needs to run sata drives.

 

[Onus]

You say you installed RAID drivers, so you may have turned on a motherboard RAID. My ABIT KN8 Ultra does this, so I made a point of NOT installing them. There's a page in the BIOS to set up the RAID. Check there. Check under USB devices too. Did you install anything like a memory card reader? It may look like a bunch of hard drives, and if it was installed before you installed the O/S, might have interfered with drive letter assignments (XP wanted to make my SATA drive I: until I re-installed with the reader removed). What mobo do you have?

 

[francescopadormo]

Both of my drives are SATA, and although I installed the RAID drivers, RAID is disabled in BIOS.

With regards to SATA drivers my motherboard manual doesn't even mention them. I assume it's because theyve found a solution to the problem, since one of my SATA drives is working.

No memory card reader was installed, just a dvd-rw and a floppy.

Definately no chance the HDD could be faulty?

Oh, and my MoBo is a Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC-RS-1.0