Adding a new hard drive

[Murr045]

Currently I have 1 DVD drive, 1 DVD burner, and 2 SATA raptors in raid 0 connected to my P4P800 deluxe motherboard. The motherboard has room for 2 SATA hard drives and 2 ATA hard drives. When I went to Windows help, it said that you can only have 4 drives total, including DVD drives. Can this be right? Can I not add an ATA hard drive to my computer?

I bought a 250 gig Maxtor HD to use for Tivo-ing. When I have everything connected, I see it detected during bootup as Primary Slave, but I don't see it in BIOS. The HD was OEM, but I have an extra cable and plenty of power cords available. What exactly do I have to do to set it up? Do I need the Win XP CD to format it?

 

[Murr045]

I'll give some specifics:

I have the Maxtor setup with no jumper as slave. When I boot up, Via technologies scans for drives. It recognizes the Maxtor as the Primary Slave. But when I go into bios it says:
Primary IDE Master: (my DVD burner)
Primary IDE Slave: (my regular DVD drive)
Secondary IDE Master: None
Secondary IDE Slave: None

The drive is not recognized in Windows at all. I don't know what primary vs secondary is really. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Cdubneeddeal]

First off..you need to have your IDE HD set up as a master, not slave. Do not ever slave a hard drive to a optical drive. Second, you need to have your IDE hard drive with a jumper set to master. Have one of the opticals set up as slave.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

I suspect that the two opticals MUST be on the Secondary IDE controller, and the new 250 should be the only drive on the primary IDE controller (as Master of its controller). That is certainly the way I always set up IDE drives, and I suspect it's because it doesn't work when done backwards.

 

[Murr045]

How do you tell the difference between primary and secondary? I guess the P4P800 manual will tell me. Thanks for the replies.

 

[BadThad]

When I went to Windows help, it said that you can only have 4 drives total, including DVD drives. Can this be right? Can I not add an ATA hard drive to my computer?

That's the standard statement for the majority of mobos out there since they only have two IDE channels. IDE is designed to only accomodate 2 devices per channel, so 2x2=4 deivces max. That is WRONG for your system since you also have SATA channels available. You can max out all the channels, have more than 4 drives and everything will be fine.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: Murr045
How do you tell the difference between primary and secondary? I guess the P4P800 manual will tell me. Thanks for the replies.

Yes, look in your manual or even on the mobo PCB, they are labelled Primary (or IDE0) and Secondard (or IDE1). Make sure you jumper all the drives correctly, DO NOT USE "cable select".

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: Cdubneeddeal
First off..you need to have your IDE HD set up as a master, not slave. Do not ever slave a hard drive to a optical drive. Second, you need to have your IDE hard drive with a jumper set to master. Have one of the opticals set up as slave.

Correct....or....put both the optical drives as master/slave on your secondary IDE channel and put the hard drive on the primary (jumper as a single drive).

 

[Murr045]

Ok I hooked up the new Maxtor HD to the primary IDE as Master, and I put the two DVD drives on the secondary IDE as master and slave. My computer tried to boot from the Maxtor, so I had to change it to boot from the raid. The Maxtor is listed in device manager, but it's not in My Computer. I thought it would show up there and that's where I would format it from. I received the OEM drive and just hooked it up, I haven't done any formatting or anything yet. Where am I supposed to do that? Thanks for the help so far!

 

[KGB]

Are you using XP or 2K?

If so, right click on My Computer and select Manage from the menu.
Then go to Disk Management and you should see your unpartitioned disk in there.
Just right click on it and start creating and formatting partitions.

 

[Murr045]

I see it in there with the rest of the drives listed as Disk 0 and it says Not Initialized. I don't see any option to reformat....At the top underneath volume, layout, etc, only the original c: is listed.

 

[Murr045]

I am using XP. I initialized the disk, but it says it's only 128 GB when it should be 250. Whats the deal with that?

 

[Murr045]

Apparently plain WinXP doesn't support drives over 130 GB. I tried to use the Maxtor big drive enabler, but it says "the registry update is not applicable for the operating system installed on this computer." Wha?

Ah, apparently you need service pack 1 for this enabler. Is there any way without SP1?

 

[stevty2889]

You have to have SP1 or SP2 or windows xp will not recognize the full size of the drive..you might be able to parition it with the maxtor utilities outside of widows, but you would have to put 2 125gb partitions on it for windows to use the whole disk. Any reason you don't want to use SP1/SP2?? I can't think of one..

 

[Murr045]

Nah I guess not. Everything works (except the new HD for now) and I just didn't want to have to make any major changes if I didn't have to. But it's no biggie. Thanks everyone, I think I may be just about good to go.