[ZaBEAN]

Okay so first I would like to state that I do not know what I'm talking about. Between SATA, PATA, IDE, EIDE, i've realized I don't know the differences, so I will be using dumb words for things I do not understand.

I have two older harddrives I'd like to install in my current system, WD800BB and WD1200JB.

Currently in my machine I have ST3320620AS 320GB on a Gigabyte GA-8I945P-G.

Here's the motherboard so I can refer via visual references since I don't know what to call these things:

http://www.gigabyte.lv/images/produc...p-g-rh_big.jpg

The current Seagate drive I have is hooked up to the motherboard via a connection that is not the wide gray one I am used to. I don't know what to call this connection, its a thick flat yellow cable, with a small black connector, to that yellow and black part above the green slots.

The WD's though connect with the wide gray, and go to those green slots.

I have one Wide Gray cable that I once thought was called IDE, with three connectors on them. Of course the furthest connector went to the mother board, and of the two that were closer together, the inside one went to the slave, and the outside one to the master. On the drives I set the jumpers to slave and master w/ slave according to the instructions on their labels. My bios didn't detect this configuration.

After trying to switch the jumpers around, and swap the connectors, with no configurations working, I scrapped the WD800 and focused on trying to get the WD1200 detect.

With this, I connected it with no jumper to the top green slot
i connected it to the bottom green slot no jumper
i connected it to the bottom green slot set as slave
i connected it to the bottom green slot set as master

i even tried this with removing the current primary HDD, all with no success.

In my BIOS the drives are currently set up as
IDE Channel 0 Primary Master: the seagate
ide channel 0 primary slave: none
ide channel 1 secondary master: my cd-rom drive
ide channel 1 secondary slave: none

i have tried autodetect on all these whenever I tried a new configuration with no luck.

in my bios i have an option in the "integrated peripherals" part that has something to do with SATA/PATA configurations, and the settings are none, auto, combined, non-combined, enhanced. its default set to auto.

on auto it says:
SATA 0/2: ide channel 0
PATA: ide channel 1

on enhanced it says
PATA: ide channel 0
SATA 0/2: ide channel 1
SATA 1/3: ide channel 2

im pulling most this from memory so i could be wrong.

i've tried combinations of these with the other variables with no success.

anyway does anything from this tell you what I'm doing wrong?

thanks for reading if you did

btw the harddrives do power on

[Elvandil]

Since it appears that your SATA drive (funny connector) is your main drive with the OS on it and it is running in "IDE mode", the setting should probably be "auto" so that your IDE drives can be IDE channel 1.

But you mention 4 options and list only 2. What do the others offer?

Stick with your effort to get just one drive working first. Connect it to the end of the IDE cable, make sure that its jumper is right and master (and that it does not have a different setting if no slave is present), and try that. Also, try the CS setting. If the position on the cable makes a difference, then it may be a CS cable.

If the drives are not partitioned and formatted, they will show in Device Manager, but not Explorer or Disk Management, which is where you will need to go to create partitions. So check there for the presence of the drive.

Right-click Computer > Manage > Disk Management.

You seem to be going about this the right way--you just haven't hit to golden combination yet. Your BIOS may have another setting, too, that is the equivalent of enabling a RAID configuration. Try that setting if you see it since they are sometimes a bit loose in their usage of the RAID term and sometimes use it to mean just that IDE drives are enabled.

[ZaBEAN]

Hey thanks for your help. It would appear that the slots I put them in were the secondary slots on the motherboard which were specifically RAID compatible, so turning on GigaRAID and setting it to ATA helped it detect the devices on the GigaRAID IDE Scan screen on bootup, but these devices still do not show up in Standard CMOS screen in BIOS, nor do they show up in Windows.

I did succesfully get them to work as master/slave in the main IDE port, where the DVDRom drive was previously connected. But i'm wondering how I can get these gigaraid slots to show up because I'd like to have all these devices working at once.