Hi, Emily.
I'm also running a (new) SATA plus 2 IDEs. My mobo is an EPoX 8KDA3+, with
an NVIDEA nForce3 250 Gb MCP chipset, with BIOS updated to 4/1/05. It has
SATA controllers built in. What mobo/chipset/BIOS are you running?
Most of your problem is in the hardware, not in WinXP, although WinXP does
have the ability to override some BIOS settings. Before you start trying to
get WinXP under control, you need to be sure your BIOS is properly
configured to match your HDs. Since my BIOS is not likely to look like
yours, I can give only generic ideas, which you will have to adapt to fit
your system.
Is SATA built into your mobo? Or on a PCI card that you added? Are the
drivers recognized natively by the WinXP CD-ROM, or did you have to use F6
during Setup to add them? (We can add a SATA drive as secondary after WinXP
is installed, but to use SATA as the boot device, we must do the F6/floppy
shuffle during Setup - unless its drivers are included in WinXP.)
IDE drives should always be recognized unless they are specifically disabled
in the BIOS. When the computer first boots, the initial text-based screen
should list the IDE HDs and CD/DVD drives as they are recognized. If SATA
is built into the mobo and enabled in the BIOS, SATA drives should be
listed, too, following the IDEs even if the boot device is SATA. Then any
add-on BIOSes for specific devices (SCSI, SATA, etc.) should be recognized
and devices connected to them should be listed, probably on a second (or
third) screen page. (That first page flashes pretty fast, but this page of
SCSI and other adapters might take several seconds.) After all this is
displayed, WinXP should display its splash screen and start to load. Are
you seeing all this when your computer boots?
Disk Management is the key utility to use to make sure your HDs are properly
partitioned and formatted. As Miss Tick said, every HD must be partitioned,
even if a single partition covers the entire HD. We don't assign a "drive"
letter to an HD; a "drive" letter can be assigned only to a "volume", which
can be a primary partition or a logical drive in an extended partition.
Then we can format the "drive", which is actually the volume, not the
unpartitioned hard drive.
Take another look at what Disk Management is telling you. Study the Help
file, which is very informative, although somewhat disjointed. Perhaps you
need to initalize your IDE drives.
Let us know what you figure out and we can probably help you find the next
step.
RC
