Secondary SATA drive not recognized

[SKreme]

I have 2 drives hooked up to my computer. The main boot drive with Win XP on it is IDE. I have a second drive that is SATA. I want to use the SATA drive as extra storage space but my pc won't recognize it. During the boot sequence it appears that the SATA drive is recognized by the system but as soon as I get into windows and look in My Computer, there is no extra drive there. I looked in disc management too and the drive wasn't shown there either. Any ideas?

 

[crjdriver]

OK, if it is not recognized in disk mgt, have you installed the sata controller drivers?

Do you have any yellow marks in device manager? If possible post a screenshot of device mgr.

 

[SKreme]

I'm not at home so I can't post a screenshot. I will try to do so later today. There are two yellow icons in device manager, one is for network controller and I forgot what the other was for. Neither said SATA.

I did not install SATA drivers but the other part of this story is I used to have the same computer booting off the SATA drive and it worked fine (Vista and Ubuntu). Now that I switched it to make it the secondary (non-boot) drive, I can't get XP to see it.

 

[crjdriver]

That makes perfect sense. If you did not install the sata driver in xp, it most likely is not finding the drive. Note it often makes a difference as to what mode is selected for the sata controller in the bios. If you select native or standard ide mode, xp usually finds the drive. If you select raid or ahci mode, it will not work unless you load a driver.

BTW vista has native drivers for most controllers; xp does not.

 

[SKreme]

I installed the SATA drivers and now XP recognizes the drive. I still have a problem though. If I open my computer, it freezes and I have to ctrl-alt-del > end task to end the non-responding My Computer window. If I do run D: though, it brings me straight to the drive no problem. I'm not sure what is making My Computer freeze up but it was happening before the SATA driver was installed too.

EDIT: Let me amend that... It doesn't always freeze but it always takes a long time to recognize the drives and sometimes it freezes too.

 

[crjdriver]

OK, well we fixed one problem. Here is what I would do now.
Download and run the drive maker's diagnostic for the drive. You download this from whoever made the drive; ie WD, Seagate, etc. Do the full or complete test on your drive.

 

[SKreme]

Which drive maker? The main IDE boot drive or the secondary SATA drive? They are made by different companies.

 

[crjdriver]

You can run both however I would start with the problem drive.

 

[Rich-M]

The sata drive that is your problem. BTW is this drive formatted? Anything on the drive?

 

[crjdriver]

BTW if it is an older 80gig WD sata drive, I have had a LOT of problems with those drives and just replaced another one last night.

 

[crjdriver]

Rich brings up a good point. Have you partition/formatted the drive in disk mgt?

 

[SKreme]

All drives are 160gb and larger. All drives are formatted. The primary IDE drive has XP on it, the secondary SATA drive is partitioned with Vista (NTFS) on one partition, Ubuntu on a second and a third that is just storage space, I believe using NTFS. Once again, Windows XP reads all the partitions if I go directly to it (i.e., Run -> D: ) but freezes up when loading My Computer.

 

[crjdriver]

What was the outcome of the disk diagnostic?

It might be a good idea to post a hijack log for review by a security person.