3 SATA drives for Non-Raid

[PrahdBittlestiffender]

I have 3 Maxtor hard drives (6Y200M0) plugged into a P4C800E-Dlx and only the two of them are recognized by Windows. I don't intend in setting up a RAID configuration. All three are Maxtor 200 gig SATA drives and they were all plugged in throughout the Windows install process. Two of them are plugged into the ICHR controller and one of them is plugged into the Promise controller. Windows was installed on the SATA1 drive. Device manager indicates no yellow check marks. Promise console drivers indicated no problems. However, I did not use F6 to install any third party drivers since I am not using the RAID config(to the best of my understanding). I am new to this technology undertaking an unusual request in not using the intended capabilities of these controllers. I had googled all I can on SATA configs and they all are single drive/RAID install related topics so any help is greatly appreciated in getting each drive to function as standalone drives.

 

[Lord Evermore]

You don't need to use the third party drivers during install unless you install to the drive on the separate controller.

Assuming you're using WindowsXP, you need to initialize the drive on the Promise controller. Since the two drives on the Intel controller were present and drivers loaded during install, they are already recognized. Now that the Promise drivers are up, the new drive has to be initialized. Go into Disk Management and you should see the third drive, right click on it, it should be "disk 2" maybe, and select initialize. Then you'll need to create a partition and format it, unless the drive is already formatted. (It'll be using FAT32 if it is, so you'd want to format with NTFS anyway.)

 

[PrahdBittlestiffender]

Thanks very much for your response. My problem was that I had originally thought the Promise BIOS was to set up an actual RAID array. But if you have only a single drive connected to the Promise controller and just want to use it as standalone drive, it can only be initialized(I think, don't have the machine anymore) as a stripe device. As soon as you open the Disk Management you are prompted to convert it. After that was complete, the disk was listed as a dynamic drive with a "Simple Partition". Did I convert this drive correctly? How will affect it as it will be used for video editing space? I already tested the drive with program installs, and running them from it. It performed as a normal drive. Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well, having it set as a dynamic disk won't cause any problems in most cases, however you shouldn't have needed to convert it. All you'd have needed to do is create the partition and format it.

The standard drive in 2k/XP is a "basic disk", which means it has a plain old partition table just like DOS used, but with the ability to use NTFS of course, and uses standard partitions. A dynamic disk is ONLY readable by Windows2k or XP Pro, any other operating system just sees one big volume that isn't even a valid partition. The partition table pretty much just shows that one non-standard partition, and Windows uses a database file stored on that partition to determine where the drive letters/volumes are located, and how they're configured.

The "simple partition" means it's a plain drive letter/volume; you could also have a partition created by striping or mirroring or spanning. A mirrored partition would be called a "fault tolerant partition". Spanning means a single drive letter is assigned to more than one physical disk, so you can add a hard drive without having drive letters change. Basic disks cannot be used for Windows' software RAID features, you have to use dynamic disks.

The Promise BIOS would have to be configured to read that drive as a single striped drive, but that would not have anything to do with making Windows create a dynamic disk. Once Windows could see the drive, then just a simple initialization and partition creation would be needed. Converting it is not needed. But it doesn't hurt anything, other than not being able to read that drive in another computer (physically installed in another machine), and you can't convert back to basic, you can only wipe the drive completely and make a new basic disk on it.