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.

Sorry, this is not a solution, just a little more information.

I have seen this problem (or very similar) when converting a system from 
SL to Windows XP Pro.  The system had two 80GB SATA drives installed, 
both of which were working happily under the linux OS.  When the Windows 
XP installation CD was put in the drive, the message "Setup is 
inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" was put on screen, 
and that was all that happened.  There was no progress from this message.

Using a Windows XP Home installation CD gave the same result as the XP 
Pro CD.
Putting a (much older) Windows 2000 installation CD into the drive led 
to normal behaviour.  (Hardware inspected, disks found, begin 
installation? etc.)  Does this indicate that the problem is not the SATA 
controller being too modern for the Windows XP installation CD?

We assumed that Windows XP couldn't see the SATA disks and so started 
messing with the BIOS settings.  Eventually we found that switching off 
the SATA disk labelled "SATA-0 / DRIVE0" from within the BIOS allowed XP 
to find the disk labelled "SATA-2 / DRIVE1".  (Note that switching of 
"SATA-2 / DRIVE1" did not allow XP to find "SATA-0 / DRIVE0".)  We then 
installed XP on "SATA-2 / DRIVE1" and have not yet got to the problem of 
getting XP to recognise the "SATA-0 / DRIVE0" disk.

No great science here, just trial and improvement.  But hey, this is 
Windows after all!

Jon

PS.  Very embarrassed.  This is my first post to this list and it is 
about a Windows problem!  Aaarrgh, I'm ignorant!

-- 
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Jon Clark
Scientific Officer
Dept. of Applied Mathematics
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, S3 7RH, UK
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