Bad day with the new system, maybe trashed a drive, or even 2 !??

[macx]

Have 1 EIDE & 2 SATA drives in the new unit.

Hooked up the EIDE first, did the basic BIOS settings,
loaded XP, XP worked, everything going great, loaded
some anti-spyware, anti virus, etc.

Then hooked up the 2 SATA drives.
WD, came with a CD with setup etc on it.

Restarted with the setup CD in, XP found
1 drive, got it formatted, so far so good.

Wouldn't find the other SATA drive.
Should I have just hooked one up and
done setup at a time? Tried unhooking
it, restarting, then shut down and hooked
it back up and restarted again. Still no find.

PROBLEM - assembled the unit in less than
optimum situation, the EIDE and the 2nd
SATA drive suffered a fall during assembly.

Tried hooking the non-responsive SATA drive
with the alternate cabling setup with the
4 pin legacy power cable, in doing so,
inadvertently left the EIDE / C drive
unpowered. On startup, of course there
was an error in loading the OS from the
unplugged EIDE / C drive.

Plugged in the C drive, restarted, STILL
getting "error loading OS". Checking
cables, hookups, still same problem.
Is it likely a drive problem, or is there
something I can do or reset in the BIOS?

I've got to finish all the little setup items,
but being XP worked fine before, did I
trash the EIDE drive somehow? Or is
there anything I can try to get it back?

I suppose the non-responsive SATA drive
is just expensive trash because of the
fall it suffered?

Thanks for any helpful suggestions!

If you can't be helpful, be gentle

 

[tdeg]

Does your system board have onboard SATA Raid?

If it does, it could have been set up so that your SATA drives were mirrored, therefore to XP it would show up as one drive.

And if you dropped a HDD and its now unresponsive, you just made a paperweight. If its under warranty, you could try to take it back.

 

[macx]

Yes, the board does have provisions for SATA RAID.

Like I said, I've yet to go into all the BIOS setup items,
hopefully that'll be it.

However, there are different hookups for RAID and
non-RAID. I've got the 2 SATA drives hooked to
the non-RAID. But I'll see tomorrow when I get
time to get more in depth in the BIOS setup.

Thanks for that little kernel of hope!

 

[patio]

Start with the minimum first.
Remove both SATA's and work on getting XP to boot properly first, repeating a few clean boots to make sure.
Then boot to the WD SATA prep CD with only 1 SATA drive hooked up and prep the 1st drive. When this is finished power down and remove that SATA as it is now ready.
Then repeat the above for the 2nd SATA drive again powering down and removing that SATA.
Now return to the BIOS and set the IDE 1st boot device to the EIDE drive.
Make sure you can boot successfully into XP.
If so introduce 1 SATA at a time, rite clik My Computer and select Manage. Go to Disk Management assign the first SATA a drive letter if it has not done so and format that drive.
Upon re-boot Explorer should see the 1st SATA.
Repeat for the 2nd drive and you should be good to go.

patio.