Windows XP Pro ignores my 2 SATA drives

[Richard Barry]

Greetings from frustrationville... Here's my pain:

Had an XP box - the same one I have now - "upgraded" to Vista - hated it, went back to XP.

Everything works great EXCEPT... my two SATA drives are not being recognised in Windows. It's VERY bizarre. I have a normal IDE drive for Windows (C:\) with two Seagate Barracuda SATA drives but only the C drive shows up.

I've done NOTHING different to the previous installations I have done with this machine but this time I cannot get the SATAs recognised. Been into disk management, had a poke around... nothing that will get my SATAs on the screen.

So, had a poke in my BIOS. Have tried enabling and disabling RAID and SATA... now I'm no RAID specialist but I'm pretty certain it wasn't enabled in my previous XP config... anyways, I've tried it with and without... nothing works.

Here's my spec:

ASUS k8NE-Deluxe Motherboard.
3 Gig Kingston RAM
ATI Radeon
blah blah...

The real kicker here is this: I am in the middle of editing a documentary and guess where my saved files are...

So guys, I'm pretty desperate here. I only have a few months before I have to submit my edit and to say I'm sweating over this is an understatement.

HAYELP!

Appreciate any information you can gimme chaps.

Oh and I don't have a floppy drive (NEVER have never needed it before!!!) coz I've seen that as a means of enabling SATA.

anyways, over to you guys.

 

[aspirulito]

have you installed your SATA controller drivers in XP? check your device manager and look for any yellow marks in it... they are usually the things that need drivers and do not work until you install them.

 

[robin_bga]

Hey buddy, i think no one is here to help u, so lets starts with this link its a like to your motherboard (chipset) drivers, Oh if u have a messanger we can find a solution faster, my yahoo ID is robin_bga.
http://modrv.com/other_devices/asus/4936prog.html

 

[Richard Barry]

I can feel a solution comin' on...

Cheers Robin... I do have those drivers but I'm reinstalling them JIC.

No yellows in my DM Aspirulto

ANyone got any other ideas while I'm waiting for Robin to login to Yahoo?

Cheers BTW

 

[Richard Barry]

ok, so reinstalled with those drivers and still nothing being picked up. In other words I still have two redundant SATA drives running with nothing being picked up in Windows XP...

ANy help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Rik]

Install all your mobo drivers either from th cd that came with the mobo or the asus website. That should fix your problem.

 

[Tedster]

format your drives completely. Reinstall windows XP and your SATA drivers.

 

[SNGX1275]

That is a pretty bold and likely unnecessary move Tedster.

You'll need to look through your BIOS or your motherboard manual and see if there is an IDE emulation or something similar to that that your SATA drives can use. This is how on many motherboards you don't have to press F6 and install SATA drivers, because they show up like IDE during install.

But what concerns me is that if you don't set the BIOS to have them behave like IDE then they'd be in SATA or RAID. You said you weren't using RAID, so that leaves SATA. Installing the drivers from within Windows should have fixed that.

Are these drives showing up in Disk Management?

If all of that doesn't work, then I'd probably be pretty concerned, and I would consider doing something like getting a Live linux distro (ubuntu 7.1 will work and is popular) and booting from that. That should see and mount all your hard drives, then if you have space on an IDE drive you could copy those important files (that apparently you don't have backed up...) over to your IDE drive. Reboot without the Live CD in, and you are back in Windows, but now with your files.