I Have A How Do I....Big Problem! Help

[Deebdee]

First... I have 2 Maxtor's, one is an Ulta ATA 66. then other one isn't, plus 1 Western Digital (also isn't ATA/66).
There's also a Plextor CD-RW and a CD-ROm (56X)
What I want to do is hook up all three hard drives plus both CD's.
The motherboard doesn't support ATA/66, so I put in a controller card just for the ATA/66. When I reboot it shows that there's a Primary Slave, no master on the Primary, then on the controller card there's a primary master drive (Maxtor 20G ATA/66, this is the only drive on the primary master on the controller card)a secondary master (Maxtor8G) and then a WD 4G as the secondard slave. The CD-Roms work well on the Secondary (MB) one as a master/and the other as a slave.
When I go into fdisk and look, they're all there, but when I go into Windows Explorer all I see is the ATA/66 Master,
Now what do I do???

[xor_chad]

Hey
Geez. OK, if fdisk can see them then the cards BIOS and your MB BIOS are working correctly.
I know this may be absurd to ask, but have you partitioned & formated them yet?
If not then windows will not see them.
This is my quick answer. If you have them all formatted then post again how the drives are set up.
The last post was hard to decipher. Laters...

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Chad Wilson
C++/ASM Programmer
PC Support Technician

[Deebdee]

Hi Chad,
Usually I partition and format myself, but this time I decided to use
Maxtor's Max Blast Plus program, and it said that it partitions
and formats. So, I assumed that was all done. I knew I should of
stuck to the old way.
So, if you put an add in a Controller card for the ATA/66 hard drive and you put the OS (Win98SE) on that ATA/66 drive, plus if you put a drive in the Primary IDE Controller built into the motherboard with it's primary slave, is it suppose to know that the OS is on the Controller card that I added to the Motherboard, or does it just take off from the Primary on the IDE Controller master drive.
I've got 3 hard drives plus 2 CD-Rom's that I'm trying to put into an IDE Motherboard that doesn't have ATA/66. The big Maxtor needs the ATA/66 add on card, put nothing else does. How do you connect everything so that everything works?
I hope this is better than the first one...I'm All Confused. This ATA/66 thing is new to me. One of these days I'll upgrade the motherboard which is a BX6, the Controller Card is SIIG UltraATA 66 PCI Controller if this helps any. I'm running a Intel 300 Mhz CPU. with 448MB Ram.
Thanks for any help you can give me on this problem Chad.

[Reid]

I can't find any way to get that configuration to work because I believe it is basically the motherboard's limitation of being able to support a maximum of four IDE devices. You may notice that when a BIOS is set to auto-detect the drives, it can only search for four.

One solution may be to get another UDMA 66 drive and attach it to the controller card as Slave, then put the CD drives on the Secondary controller cable.


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reido@my-deja.com

[Deebdee]

Well....Chad, I went in and checked both extra drives and apparently Maxtor's program did not format either one of them. I guess every now and then you have to learn the hard way. I spent many hours the other day and could of save myself some time if I had check each hard drive after Maxtor got done with them. Outside of the time formating 2 of the HD's, the whole setup only took probably 10 minutes to do. Thanks for your help and steering the blind back on course. I guess you live and learn! I learned not to trust the big boys and maybe it's worth double checking their work after all.
I think this forum, and I've been to many, is the TOP #1 on my list!
Thanks again!!! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
I'm a happy camper once again!