SCSI drive array not mapped to drive letter

[Robert Nowicki]

Hello,
I have connected an Arena Indy 2400 SCSI drive array to my
Windows XP computer. It is on SCSI channel #5. When the
computer boots I can go into the SCSI BIOS and see the
array on channel #5. I also set the SCSI transfer speed to
160 as that is the array transfer speed, but the SCSI
controller is Ultra-320.

When Windows XP boots up there is no driver letter
associated with the array. Windows does not see it. If I
go into device manager and look at the disk drives it
shows up there. When I look at the Volume information it
shows me that the drive is not initialized. How do I
initialize the drive so that Windows XP will assign it a
drive letter?

I did go into the SCSI boot utility and initialize the
drive but that had no effect.

Thanks,
Robert

 

[Guest]

Hi Robert,

I'm no expert - I have big problems trying to get my new box to boot from my SCSI system drive when I have an IDE hard drive connected, but I did run into a similar problem to yours.

I have four SCSI drives on the channel with my system drive, two 10K drives and two 15K drives, all U-160. The two 10K drives were formatted as Basic style Primary partitions, and XP had no problem with them, but the 15K drives where invisible.

I went back into my SCSI BIOS (Adaptec) and did some reconfiguring. The U-320 setting of the controller is OK as is. All of your LVD SCSI devices will run at their optimum speed (unless you put one of those old SE devices, such as a tape drive or even a DVD or CD on the bus).

The Adaptec BIOS has a disk format routine, which is a low level format. Doing that will most likely wipe out the manufacturer's ID on the disk, but your controller will be happy it. I did that, then went back to XP to see what happened.

I go into the Control Panel, Administartive Tools, Computer Management, then Disk Management. The two 15K drives are now visible to XP, labeled only as Disk 1 and Disk 2 - no manufacturer's info shown. At this point, I have to tell XP what to do with them. I wanted these two ultra fast drives to be a striped array, so I chose to make them Dynamic Disks, and chose "Striped". You can do this by right clicking the "Disk 1" or Disk 2", or by using the tool bar drop down menus. What you do is up to you. "Basic" is the traditional style of partitoning, while "Dynamic" is for RAID configurations (Striped, mirror or JBOD).

When I finished reformatting (high level) as a stiped pair with XP, my drives now show up as a single drive with the letter "S:", which I chose during the XP formatting. Back in the "My Computer", it show Drive S:, but also a Drive D: and E: which are empty (but full) - they are sized as "0".

Well, Robert, that got my invisible SCSI drives recognized and working. Your problem may be more basic - such as not having a SCSI driver loaded for your controller when you installed XP. That happens by doing the F6 routine during the Windows installation, and having your SCSI controller's drivers on a floppy, ready for Windows to grab them.

I hope this helps... as I said from the beginning, I'm no expert, and there are a bunch of them here on this site. Take my experience as something to consider, but don't do that SCSI BIOS low level format routine until you've checked everything else out.