First off, i'll start with the system specs, or what I can remember of them:

AMD Athlon 3700+ processor
2 gigs RAM
7900 GT Vid card
Windows XP
Mobo with two SATA connectors, and two IDE connectors

Recently, my 200 gig SATA drive crashed. It was the only drive I had in the computer. I had a spare IDE 60 gig lying around, so I popped it in and started rockin'. I ordered a new SATA drive, that came yesterday. Everything was working fine on the IDE drive, plugged into IDE1 on the mobo. My DVD drive is plugged into IDE2, and always has been.

Well, i popped in my SATA drive, and expected a seamless installing process for windows XP. I couldn't get the IDE drive out of the way, even after formatting the drive to get rid of the windows partition. I eventually unplugged the drive to install XP on my SATA drive.

Once windows XP was installed and running, i noticed two things which are why i'm here:

1. I have a "Safely remove hardware" icon on the windows status bar (by the clock) that has as the only hardware my SATA drive. This is laughable. It's offering to let me safely remove hardware that the operating system is running on. Is there a way to convince windows that this hardware is not an external USB drive? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the function of the HDD, and the correct model number is even listed in the device manager. Why is it treating my SATA drive as a removable USB drive?

2. I cannot for the life of me get windows to recognize the old IDE drive. While it was out of the computer I switched the jumper to "slave" thinking that might ease the process of having it as a second drive in my PC. I'm thinking I should switch that back, but i'm also thinking it doesn't matter. I look in the Device Manager, and the IDE drive is listed, with the proper model number, and it is working properly. However I did not format the drive, and it's not showing up in windows explorer. I figured I could go to windows explorer and format it (NTFS) just like normal. It's just not showing up.

I got no clue how to proceed here. I really want access to that 60 gigs of backup space, but this is getting frustrating... Anything I can do?

[EDIT] - Solved, I got a partition manager, and switched the HDD to master. She works!

This post has been edited by Fritzo: Feb 2 2007, 12:39 AM

As far as the safely remove hardware goes...that's how Windows recognizes SATA. I've never safely removed my boot drive, but I've always been tempted...

It's supposed to do that; SATA is technically plug & play so in theory it would be possible to stop the drive and disconnect it for another one in the same way pen drives work. In practice, Windows won't let you do this but it will keep pointing it out to you. Just ignore it/



Needs to be partitioned and formatted before it shows up in My Computer. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management. Master and Slave settings are irrelevant.