Hi Troy,

> 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.

Well, I forwarded your email to my older brother (a Windows and x86 hardware 
expert), and his response is below. If you need to talk directly to him I 
can give you his email address off list. He's not on the SL list :)

Michael.

Mic, 

This is a common issue with WXP - especially if the drivers are not used 
(via floppy) during the installation of Windows (whether Pro or Home). 

Troy's explaination is quite broad as there are many factors that need to be 
taken into account. 

Ie BIOS settings, which model the mb is, whether the sata connectors are 
SATA I or SATA II etc 

Assuming (which is always a bad thing to do - but we will for this example) 
that Troy is trying to connect the new 320GB drive (which are ALL SATA II 
now) to an older mb which only has a SATA I controller onboard (namely the 
VIA chipset controller). 

The 320GB Seagate drive is REQUIRED to be dropped to the 1.5Mb (with Seagate 
Drives this is a small jumper on the connector end of the drive) so that the 
VIA controller can "see" the drive. 

This is because of the SATA I and II differences in the way they talk to the 
chipset. 

Linux "sees" this drive only because it "looks" via the chipset in a 
different way that Windows does, hence the automatic recognition of both the 
VIA chipset AND the drive attached through the chipset. 

THEN a windows installation may be performed using the (already created) 
driver disk off the mb CD. 

This is only one scenario, but usually the most common. 

The BIOS plays a large part in this scenario also - the boot sequence NEEDS 
to be correct. 

My other assumption is that Troy has a competent knowledge of computer 
hardware (otherwise he shouldn't be tampering with the insides of a system) 
 

If we can get more info on the hardware being used and the EXACT setup of 
the machine (including BIOS settings) we can normally work out almost any 
issue. 

Ray.