[peterrex]

Woe is me and here I am again. So I got it up and running after two installations of XP and avoiding some foolish moves I am more stable than before. The hitch is that I installed a matched pair of SATA Maxtor drives but as I had to install as a "Standard PC" only one drive appears in My Computer. However, in the VIA RAID utility, both drives are visible, though not in an array. I tried that but in as much as I had to agree to change the Master Boot Record, (duh) things did not go as I had planned and I was back where I began. Now I'm getting a constant request to install new hardware but there is nothing attached to this system yet to install, other than the DVD which is not a problem. I never could get it to take any kind of RAID drivers during the set up and did not figure out what I had overlooked. I'd like at least to have the use of the other drive. I had planned to have a RAID O for the speed of video editing, but I'd settle for stability over all. Any ideas?

[Advertisements]

have you installed the mobo drivers? those will activate all the integrated (onboard) bits, like audio, ethernet, etc.
what are the new hardware messages saying they want to install?

have you formatted the second drive yet? if you go to disk management, you should see the drive there, but if its not formatted, windows wont be able to read/write to it.

[audioboy]

have you installed the mobo drivers? those will activate all the integrated (onboard) bits, like audio, ethernet, etc.
what are the new hardware messages saying they want to install?

have you formatted the second drive yet? if you go to disk management, you should see the drive there, but if its not formatted, windows wont be able to read/write to it.

[peterrex]

For reasons that I don't understand I can't seem to locate any service called Disk Management that will allow me to do any formatting from within Windows. Perhaps I am dense but I haven't figured out what I thought should be a basic sort of thing.
I made the previously mentioned second installation of Windows largely for this reason, I thought I might have the oppurtunity to format the second drive at the time of installation, but I did't see that. Both the drives in question were previously formatted on the other machine prior to this installation so I had thught the disks would be clean. However Windows insisted on doing a format as it installed. Since I couldn't get it to install in a RAID array, it was installed as a "Standard PC" in the setup and there was never an opportunity I saw to include the second disk in any way. Thus, it doesn't show up in the My Computer list of drives available but does show up and purport to be wrking properly in the Device Manager. I have suspected that some sort of formatting by this machine may be what it wants but cannot see where to do that.
Further, when I reboot I get a check disk dialog that File Record segments are unreadable, it checks and lists 20 unreadable files then directories and then a recovery of orphaned files all into one directory and then finally boots up properly. I have had this happen a few times and am uneasy that it will lead to further problems down the road.
I am now disinclined to install a RAID 0 as it would result in unrecoverable files in the case of a crash. So just having the faster system is fine, but I do want both drives available.
As far as the Hardware Installation windows are concerned, they seem to have to do with an Unknown Device which is related to the Radeon graphics card. This may be the Panasonic Mini DV player/recorder I have attached. I thought it needed capture drivers, as it was working fine in the previous setup. I'm still trying...Any advice?

[audioboy]

the quick and easy way to get to many functions administrative type functions in XP is to right click on 'my computer.' from there select manage, then disk management. on the bottom right will be a list of all hard drives, and CD/DVD drives. one will likely show up as unformatted.
a little trick I like to do as well is change the letters of the optical drives to X, Y, or Z. this allows for any new drives being added (or partitions, or detachable drives, or virtual drives, etc) to continue going down the alphabet from the top, without getting confused about CD drives in the middle of that.

try disconnecting the mini-dv capture device, see if the hardware errors go away. if so then you know that is the cause, and where to focus the your energy.

[peterrex]

The drive and the collection of yellow question marks in the Device Manager are two different issues. The so called hardware trying to be installed I think might be a faulty installation of the ATI graphics drivers. I'm going to try uninstalling them to see if that goes away. It's not the DV recorder as I uninstalled it and nothing has changed so far.
The hard drive that I can't see may be incorrectly partitioned as a MB Partition. I looked at it in the Device Manager and compared the two drives. The visible one is listed as C: in its properties and the other has no name attached, just a presence acknowledged. It does say MB partition. So how do I go about repartitioning this drive as a secondary? I still don't see any format options on any menu even when I right click on the My Computer. I'll try to uninstall the phantom hardware as I don't think it is anything that will cause operational problems.
Whadyathink?

Edited by peterrex, 23 June 2005 - 08:31 PM.

[audioboy]

"collection of yellow question marks in device manager..."
oh man. bummer. have you installed the mobo drivers?

ok, you can see the drive in disk management. the C drive is your system drive, so dont do anything to it. but the other one, just click in the main area of the drive and format should be an option. you should be able to just accept the default settings they offer in terms of NTFS, cluster size, etc. it should also ask what letter to assign to the drive- if you changed the letters of the CD/DVD drives like I mentioned, then you can set you slave drive as D and be all good.

also, if you right click on the drive listing (bottom part of disk management, where it lists the drive as drive #, basic or dynamic, etc) you can set it to basic. I hate the dynamic disk function personally, but its you choice. whatever your C drive is, make the slave drive the same.

[peterrex]

I was under the impression I had installed all the mobo drivers from the disk that came with the board. It's the Abit Guru disk with all the drivers for the AV8 board. The yellow question marks all say it is something related to Radeon 9600 which is the ATI graphics card. I have also returned to the drivers for that as well and still have the "uninstalled hardware" windows popping up over and over.

As far as the formatting of the disk goes, I finally (duh) went to the the Microsoft Knowledge Base and did a search. It goes into a lengthy and semi-convoluted explanation as to why it is a limitation of Windows XP that makes it such a difficult matter to install mass storage device drivers during the F6 part of the OS installation. Finally it says that in order to format/partition the other drive I need to do it with the assistance of the OS setup CD. It goes on and on and I think I have the gist of it now but for *#@*sake you'd think something this elementary might actually be part of the basic "user friendly" OS they so proudly sell. Sigh. Back to the yellow question marks.