Windows can't see my drives on my P5AD2-E Premium...

[snakedjip]

Hi,

I previously had a Windows XP installation, with the hack published on
Tom's hardware to make software RAID5 available in XP.

I therefore had 1 SATA drive as the XP drive, and 4 other SATA drives
in RAID5, connected to the Silicon Image controller.

Now, I want to reinstall XP, not using RAID5.

If I boot up with the Asus utility disk and run FDISK, I can see the
drives. They had some weird partition type, and so I deleted the weird
partitions, so that I now have 4 unpartitioned drives.

When I boot up the new XP (without the hack), I can't see the drives,
whether it be in Windows Explorer, Disk Management, Partition Magic or
Seagate Disk Wizard.

What do I need to do in order to see my drives in Windows ?

Do I need to partition in FDISK, and if so, what kind of partition
(they are 200Gig disks) ?

Do I need to install a Silicon Image driver, and if so, which one,
where do I find it, and how do I install it ?

Help !

 

[Paul]

Hi,

I previously had a Windows XP installation, with the hack published on
Tom's hardware to make software RAID5 available in XP.

I therefore had 1 SATA drive as the XP drive, and 4 other SATA drives
in RAID5, connected to the Silicon Image controller.

Now, I want to reinstall XP, not using RAID5.

If I boot up with the Asus utility disk and run FDISK, I can see the
drives. They had some weird partition type, and so I deleted the weird
partitions, so that I now have 4 unpartitioned drives.

When I boot up the new XP (without the hack), I can't see the drives,
whether it be in Windows Explorer, Disk Management, Partition Magic or
Seagate Disk Wizard.

What do I need to do in order to see my drives in Windows ?

Do I need to partition in FDISK, and if so, what kind of partition
(they are 200Gig disks) ?

Do I need to install a Silicon Image driver, and if so, which one,
where do I find it, and how do I install it ?

Help !

Maybe one way to fix it, would be to find a utility that
can truely wipe the disk? There is probably a reserved sector,
or some other method, being used to hold the old RAID info.

The ATA spec has an option to "hide" part of the disk (Host
Protected Area?). You can actually trim the size of a drive,
by reducing the size register in the interface. That makes
it possible for clever software, to write stuff up high, then
change the size register and hide it. Then, regular OS commands
cannot see the info. I don't know if any OS or application
software uses that hack, but it is one more way of bolloxing
up the works. The ATA/ATAPI commands are "SET MAX ADDRESS",
"SET MAX LOCK", "SET MAX UNLOCK" and so on.

This is an example of a wiping utility. I don't know anything
about this beast, or others like it. I would make sure that
no disks, beside the ones to be wiped, are connected while
this tool is being used. (I hope this util has options in
the interface, to only do one write pass, as waiting for
"N" passes would suck.)

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

(appears to support concurrent wipe, so do the four disks together)
http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/index.html

There may be more clever utilities, that know about the issue,
or tools that have a good idea of which parts of the disk hold
MBR, partition tables, reserved sectors, and the like. If while
the RAID5 was running, Windows provided a management utility,
maybe there was an option in there to "delete array" ?

HTH,
Paul