Windows XP second HD problem

[squirrelz]

This one has me stumped.

A friend of my Dads has an HP PC that he wants to do video editing on, then write the edited video to DVD.

It has a 5400rpm HD and a Combo drive, so I added a 7200rpm Seagate HD and a DVD writer (forget which make but irrelevant).

For some reason, the 7200rpm Seagate (installed as primary slave) shows up fine in the BIOS, but when you boot into XP (Home), there's no sign of it, either in Device Manager, or Disk Management.

Any ideas? Best suggestion so far is to set the Primary Slave to "none" in the BIOS and see if XP finds it then, but I thought I'd see if there were any other suggestions, perhaps some elementary schoolboy error I've made somewhere.

[mondeoman]

Its needs to be formatted n all that - I used the WinXP help file to add a drive a couple of months ago and it worked out ok .....

[squirrelz]

Yeah, know about that - but until it shows up in Device Manager and Disk Management, partitioning and formating isn't going to be possible.

[roop]

Windows now makes very little use of the BIOS so disabling it in there I doubt would make much difference. How about switching the devices round and making the setup as follows... :

5400 HDD PM
Combo PS
7200 HDD SM
DVD-R SS

Roop

[squirrelz]

I can try it, but the 7200rpm HD is for the video editing and when writing the DVDs, I/O contention will occur on the secondary IDE channel.

Also, IIRC, the IDE channel has to run at the mode of the least advanced device, so if the combo drive is PIO mode only, then the primary HD will be running in PIO mode too.

I think I'm going to have to borrow the PC for a few days and play around it.

Thanks for suggestion - will have a bit more of a ponder on the subject, and further suggestions gratefully accepted.

[roop]

You shouldn't be able to saturate the IDE bus or have sufficeint I/O conflicts to affect your writing. I can happily burn CD's from an IDE HDD to a 52x CD writer on the same channel with no issue whatsoever. Not sure what the data rate is at 52x but based on 52x the standard 1x 150kbit/s that's over 7MB/s.

All modern optical drives will run UDMA mode - even my ancient (1998) Creative Labs DVD-ROM runs UDMA so your combo should be fine.

[ErnestM]

Some of the more modern BIOS settings will have you specify which drive is which, so you may want to take a look into the BIOS again under and "advanced" area or some such...

ErnestM

[Roadrage]

squirrelz said:

Yeah, know about that - but until it shows up in Device Manager and Disk Management, partitioning and formating isn't going to be possible.

boot from the XP cd or boot disk and format it from there.

may need to change boot option in bios to allow boot from cd if its turned off.

then it will show up in windows

it wont show up till its formated.

problem solved




>> Edited by Roadrage on Tuesday 23 March 07:50

[arcturus]

Roadrage said:

it wont show up till its formated.

Not true. An unformatted disk will appear in the disk management console and in windows explorer but obviously you can't store data on it until it's formatted. I have seen this many, many times.

>> Edited by arcturus on Tuesday 23 March 08:36

[arcturus]

Squirrelz, clutching at straws here, but have you checked the jumper settings on all the drives. I know the bios detects them ok, but you never know.....

[warmfuzzies]

look under the disk management console.

right click my computer, manage, then disk management, you should be able to see, format, control the disk fromthere.

Kevin

[squirrelz]

Ok - went back and had a look at it yesterday.

Went into the BIOS and set the Primary Slave to None. Booted the PC up and lo and behold, the second hard drive appeared, in Device Manager, Disk Management and even in explorer!

Can't understand why it made a difference, but hey, if it works....