Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hi,
> My machine currently has 2 regular hard drives.  One of the hard drives 
> started going bad, so I needed to replace it.
> The motherboard does SATA, so I figured I'd get a SATA drive since 
> they've come down in price.  I got a nice 320 Gig drive from seagate, 
> put it into the machine and ... windows doesn't see it.
> Linux see's it just fine, so I partitioned it in the linux side for 
> windows because windows often has a hard time with blank drives, but no 
> luck.
> My motherboard has two SATA controllers.  One is VIA, and the other is a 
> Promise Fasttrack.  I have tried putting the drive on both controllers. 
>  I've put on the drivers from my motherboard CD.  Still nothing.
> The only indication I get that something is on there is the VIA comes 
> with a RAID confuration program.  It shows the drive, even gives lots of 
> details, but Windows just won't do anything with it.
> Oh, and when the drive was on the promise controller, I tried it doing 
> RAID and doing the Plain IDE.  Neither worked.
> Oh, this is Windows XP, if that's important.
> I guess if I can't get it to see the drive, I'll just use the whole 
> drive for Linux and forget about my Windows.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Troy
> 
> p.s. Yes, this currently is happening to me, I'm not making this up.
> p.p.s. No, I don't really expect anybody to really answer this.  I just 
> couldn't resist sending this considering the number of "it works on 
> windows why not linux" e-mails we get.


Try to create an installation CD with the latest service pack integrated. It is possible 
that they had added recognition for your/any SATA controller in the latest service pack.

If this does not work, you can wait for V*sta in January (for businesses V*sta is 
available now). Of course you will eat up all your horsepower to minimize/maximize 
windows, but that is what W*ndows is all about. :-)

Also, you can go virtualisation and install Windows under vmware or something.


So, in summary what I would do:

1) Integrate the latest service pack in an installation CD, and try installation from this.

2) If this does not work you can wait for V*sta in January, or use virtualisation to 
install XP, or do not use W*ndows.