[coendou]

Just installed Windows 7 pro 64 bit clean, full version on a brand spanking new WD SATA drive.

It seems to have lots of problems with hard drives though.

First it wouldn't instal unless I disconnected all hard drives except the destination and the DVD. Gave me format errors.

Odd thing was that I formated it on my old XP OS drive then nothing, then the big disconnect and voila.

I use a lot of music recording software, and have always used a leaner OS drive (100-250 GB) and a secondary for storage and back up (1 TB atm)

At first windows seven didn't see the other drives although bios recognized them, but the 1 TB SATA drive showed up under device manager.

After updates and who knows what, after a new start, it gave me an error message that it found a new HD, but it needed to be formatted in order to use it. This is the 1 TB SATA drive.

I also have my old IDE drives, one, an another back up and the old OS XP pro drive, that I thought I might be able to run and import emails and passwords and such from, but they only show up in Bios.

1st question, can windows 7 read and xp drive, like u used to be able to with xp, if it were a slave drive? I used to when upgrading to a bigger drive, do that and import old emails and passwords and bookmarks and so.

2nd, since I formatted the new drive with XP and installed win 7 on it with no problems, why won't it recognize my back up drive that was formatted with XP?

It may be a SATA issue? With old IDE drives you could always set master and slave and the PC knew which to run as a boot drive with OS and the other which was only data. I don't know, there is no such jumper settings.

I really hope to save some time sending everything on my big drive to an online back up service, reformat and then re-download 150G of data.

Any know if that's my only option?

I have installed xp compatibilty. Shouldn't the drive also work in XP compatibilty mode? It's just a dump drive for stuff to big for my main drive. It has no programs on it. It did however seem to be where xp chose for my recycle bin for some reason. Maybe that's something.

Would dual boot help in this situation (never tried it)

Maybe it's a raid controller issue? (also I have no idea about, or ever monkey'd with)

Thanks in advance.

[coendou]

Nobody has any ideas about windows 7 and secondary hard drives with data only?

[fairnooks]

I had a chipset driver I/O controller problem with 7RC on one system, always lost contact with secondary drives and non-system partitions internally. In fact, it altered something on three externals and I had to recover what data wasn't backed up and reformat and start over with all three and there hasn't been a problem since I took that system to XP (it came with Vista and displayed similar tendencies that exploded with 7RC).

I'm not running 7 on a mixed system (IDE/SATA) right now so I don't know about the IDE detection but it would be pretty bad if 7 ddin't work just fine with them and file system (NTFS or FAT32) should be the only consideration, not incompatibility if came from an XP system. Also if they don't show in 7 they won't show in XP mode since that's virtualized and depends on the host OS for filtered detection availability of devices that aren't already virtualized and self-contained.

Since it seemed like you started having problems, maybe motherboard-related, right from the words format and install, I think I would start all over again. In fact I would install XP first, get it all set up and see if that worked fine and then I would install 7 on a seperate partition and dual boot for a while to see if 7 was as compatible as XP or maybe point to where the problem is if both have trouble. If everything was fine then you could remove the boot entry for XP and delete that installation and motor on with 7 if all was well.