hard drive not being seen on install

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike

Hi i have had to reinstall win XP pro. I have 2 hard drives, one on the
Primary Ide Chanel, the other as a SATA drive. The bios shows both drives as
ok. When I install XP, I come to the option of selecting the partion, it
shows the slave drive, (IDE primary channel), but shows the other drive as
an unknown disc and calls it an atpi disc. I have tried running a maxtor
powermax but that comes up as "requires dos". Can anyone please help?
 
This is because Windows does not have the drivers for your SATA
controller. When you are booting off the Windows XP CD, it offers you
the ability to install these drivers by pressing F6. There may be a
floppy with the drivers that came with your drive?

The only other thing I can think of is try using XP Setup to delete the
partition on the SATA drive and format it and see if that works. It
also could be because you have it as a dynamic disk.

Nathan McNulty
 
Hi, thanks for that!

I understand what you are saying, but i did not get any drivers with the
drive, "Maxtor diamond max", and it all went well. As to your other
suggestion, I've delete the partition and go to format, ok, but it seems to
hang at 0%. I have previously formatted the drive today but it came up with
errors on copying the files to disc (after the format process) i.e. windows
could not find the selected file, please insert your xp disc!

Have you any other suggestions?

Thanks for your time
 
This may suck, but try this:

Install XP to the Slave, once in XP, choose to do a clean install to the
SATA drive (once you have configured it in XP), then once it is
installed to the SATA drive, you can format the Slave and edit the
boot.ini file so that you only have 1 OS to choose from as it will have
2 entries ;)

Nathan McNulty
 
Hi, I am a bit loathed to try that as all my life's work is on that drive!
(I did have a look at doing it but it wouldn't allow me to create a new
partition)!

I did leave the format process running over night, and it did complete (or
it appeared to complete) it then ran on to copying files but got stuck again
on the "can't copy files required, please insert XP disc, message! Is it
possible to tell if it is the CD, CD drive, or if the hard drive is not
excepting the files? I previously made a mirror image of my XP cd (Roxio
copy disc) so I don't think it is that.

Thanks again for your time
 
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