2nd SCSI HD not seen by WinXP

[CountyInd]

I have an ASUS P4P800 SE mb with an Intel 3.2 Pentium (Prescott) 800MHz CPU with a 3.5 floppy, a CDROM drive and a DVD drive. The C drive is a Seagate SCSI Cheetah formatted to NTSF and contains WinXP Home edition with SP2 and various programs. Data and rarely used programs are stored on an IDE and a SATA drive. The SCSI is driven by a PCI LSI card model LSI20160-HP with a 2 outlet shielded cable. Everything works very well.

I am trying to clone my C drive to a second SCSI that is exactly the same model as the C drive. My intent is that if the first drive fails (I've had 2 in a row fail recently) I can just instal the clone and discard the dud). The second drive is seen by both the LSI card firmware (it low level formats OK) and the BIOS. It is also seen by the WinXP registry and I have tried turning on "Full Permissions" therein. However, the second SCSI is not seen by WinXP in Disk Management.

I have tried both BIOS and PnP control, but to no avail. Also, I have the drive ID's and the termination set properly. I disconnected all the other drives and formatted the new drive to NTSF (so WinXP thought it was the only drive) without any problems but when I reconnect the C drive and boot from it from C drive, both are again seen by the LSI, the BIOS and the registry but not WinXP. Just in case I was confusing the issue I also tried disconnecting the SATA and IDE drives but that didn't help.

Would an obvious solution be to make the new drive active? If so how do I make it active if WinXP doesn't even see it? Indeed, how do I do anything WinXP related if it is unseen? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Sorry this was so long. Thanks in advance

 

[Nodsu]

What do you mean by Windows registry seeing it?

Since the drives are identical, maybe Windows is having problems telling the difference? You get such issues with identical DVD-ROM drives for example. Update the firmware on one of the drives (if possible) to make them "different"?

Try cloning the drives in a non-Windows environment. Any unixoid OS booted from a CD should do.

 

[CountyInd]

I don't think the drives being identical is the root of the problem because I tried it with a different SCSI drive and although both the LSI card firmware and the BIOS saw the drive WinXP's disk management didn't. Actually, I got an identical SCSI drive thinking that the drives being different could have been the problem.

What I mean by the registry seeing it is this: When I regedt32 and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ENUM\PCI then I see both drives under the SCSI section.

I'm not sure what a "unixoid OS" booted from a CD is. Would you please explain further and recommend one?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Nodsu]

I meant Linux or BSD or anything similar

Try Knoppix or INSERT - Linux versions that run off a CD. You have to familiarise yourself with the dd command.

It all boils down to a single command: "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=10M" where sda is your source drive and sdb the destination (please verify this before running!).