Adding third IDE Drive to a Windows XP Setup

[John Connic]

Hi All:

I recently smoked my motherboard(Long Story). So I decided to change out the
Motherboard and change the OS from Win2000 to Win XP. So I got a new ATA133
hard drive of 120 Gigs and installed as the bootable partition. I installed
XP and everything was fine. I had the ATA133 hard drive on the Primary
Channel as Master and a CDROM as the slave.

After this I added the two hard drive I originally had in the machine. These
drives were ATA100 of 30 Gig & 20 Gig in size. I put them on the secondary
channel with one being master and the other being slave.

When I started up XP it got to opening screen and it hung up with the
progress dialog going back and forth. If I took out one drive and ran with
two drives instead of three it worked fine with either drive.

I tried all possible combinations with the boot drive in Primary Master and
the other devices in various positions. It would only work with two drives.

Is there limitation as to number of hardrives or the total storage size in
XP ? Also is there a limitation to the number of partitions you can have in
XP ?

 

[Jerry]

Swapping out the motherboard requires you to boot from the XP CD and do a
repair install so that Windows can correctly identify your new hardware.
Adding the third hard drive should not interfere with this process.

 

[Geoffw]

make sure the jumper settings on the old drives are correct.

Make sure the bios has identified them correctly

if yes try another IDE cable on these drives.

Geoff

 

[Mats]

Yes there are limitations but you nowhere near them.

XP will handle more than three disks and it will handle a few TB of disk at
least so that is not your issue. This could be a hardware problem with the
mainboard, drive or cable. Strappings could be wrong. It also could be a bad
driver for the ide controller.

I would start with the driver. download the latest drivers from the
manufacturers web, install them and se what happendes

 

[John Connic]

Hi All:

Thanks for the great ideas. Some I have tried and some I will try.

Thanks for your help.