Help,

I needed to completely reinstall windows the other night. Since then I have not been able see my third hard drive. Can someone guide me on how to set up my pc to see that drive?

How are the drives configured? Primary - Secondary - Master -slave?

Is this ATA or SATA or RAID?

Does the BIOS see all the drives?

Were all the drives working OK before the reinstall? Why did you need to reinstall? How did you reinstall?

Unfortunatly I did not do the original setup. So, I am unsure how the system is configured or if it is an ATA, SATA or RAID. How do I check the BIOS? All of the drives were working fine prior to reinstall. I was getting a blue screen and nothing that I did would get rid of it. The only thing I had left was a reinstall. I did not worry about it because all of my data is stored on the third drive so I had nothing to loose. I used the windows disk and had it uninstall and then reinstall windows using the same folder.

Most motherboards use the Delete key to enter the BIOS Setup.

When you power on the computer press Delete. If this does not work look at the POST or Logo screen for a hotkey to Setup.

In Setup look for a BOOT tab the a HDD tab and the drives should be listed.


Also from within XP where have you looked? Have you checked Disk Management?

Start/Run/ diskmgmt.msc

The BIOS does recognize all three hard drives. Previously I had just checked by right clicking on My Computer and selecting Explore. So, I did do the diskmgmt.msc and it did not see the third drive. I do have two dvd drives. The old drive designations were c, d and e for the hard drives and the dvd's were f and g. Now they are c and d for the hard drives and e and f for the dvd's.

Having two Optical drives (DVD) they are most likely Secondary Master and slave.

The three Hard Drives are probably in a SATA/RAID configuration as a standard ATA would only allow two hard drives as Primary Master and slave.

If this line of thought is correct you need to load RAID drivers during an install of XP.

In the first instances of installing XP you will see a note to press F6 in order to load drivers.

Here you need a driver disk from your motherboard. If you do not have this we might be able to find it on-line if you can ID the motherboard.


Please post back the results of this scan:

http://www.d-a-l.com/hardware-scan.php

ok I just did an install of XP and either missed the F6 prompt or it did not show it for some reason. The motherboard is an ASUS A8V Ai Series. I did a search for RAID controllers for that motherboard and do not know which to use. I do not have the disc for the board.

I did finally find what I think is the correct controller. So, I downloaded it from ASUS's website. It came Zipped. I then extracted the file to my documents but I do not know where to go from here.

Make Promise RAID driver floppy for Windows 2000/XP/2003

If you double click the .exe there should be a prompt to create a floppy disk.

I am assuming that you are doing a Clean Install of XP from a Microsoft XP CD:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

If you are using an OEM CD your options may be different.

Alright I did that and just like you said it asked to create a floppy boot disk. But, I do not have a 1.44 floppy drive, and it did not allow me to change do a optical drive. Ugh