my CD/DVD drive is primary master?! but thats only the half of it.

[Blengineer]

This is only one of many related issues involving my installed drives. Simply put, in my BIOS my Optical Drive is set as the primary master. My primary slave is one of my hard drives and I cannot detect my other ones at all.

Naturally I went to change it using the CMOS, selecting the Optical Drive and pressing auto detect. Auto detect does not detect ANY of my 3 Hard drives. I tried aswell to auto detect drives in primary slave and secondary master and they also do not detect ANY of my drives.
When I am booting up my computer it preforms an IDE scan that looks like:
Drive 0: not detected
Drive 1: not detected
Drive 2: not detected
Drive 3: not detected
that seems bad to me...

If my Optical Drive can't be changed to a different status I don't really care. The more important issue for me is getting my other HD's working:
I have 2 Seagate Barracuda 120gig SATA drives and 1 of same brand and size that is PATA. Currently, One works without any problems and I installed windows XP on it. I beleive it is my PATA drive but I know of no way to be sure. My windows XP installer could not find my SATA drives, so is it possible that I need to get drivers for them?
I have been trying along that route but find it hard to get drivers that can be put onto a floppy for use in the windows install (like where it asks to press F6).

Now when I am in windows:
If i go to device manager and go to Disk Drives it shows 3 drives. One is the one that is formatted and running (I think this one is IDE). Then I have 2 others that show up. These 2 have the same name and the same amount of space and they are both SCSI. (I have only a vague idea of what IDE and SCSI mean)

So to make THAT story short, my device manager can tell that I have 3 hard drives plugged in and they all say that they are working properly but my windows XP disk can only tell that I have 1 drive installed and my CMOS cannot auto detect any drives.

In addition to this, I went to "administrative tools" > "computer management" > "disk management" and it again showed that I have 1 drive formatted and 2 that are both unformatted. They also said that the 2 unformatted ones were "unactivated" so I figured activating them was a good idea but that didn't do anything to help me see them.

I am still unfamiliar with much of what I am talking about, being as I learned most of the technical stuff yesterday. I just want to be able to use my 2 other drives.

If i didn't give enough information please ask me for more and I will try to find whatever I can out for you. Sorry, lots of words. Any help or clues would be awsome. (I hope there's not too many typos up there)

 

[Markbnj]

Hmm, I think the best thing might be to start over. You have two IDE drives, right? One is an optical drive, and other is the Seagate PATA drive? And then you have two SATA drives (that, incidently, are the same size and brand as the PATA disk)?

Here's how I would set it up: plug the PATA hard disk into IDE channel 0. If using a double-connector IDE cable plug it into the end connector (someone check me on that).

Plug the optical drive into IDE channel 1. Both of these drives will be the only drive on their respective channels, and will be in the IDE master role. Typically whether an IDE drive is slave or master now depends on which connector it is plugged into. Hence why I asked someone to check me on that above, but you can google it up easily enough as well.

Now plug the two SATA drives into SATA0 and SATA1.

Whether you need drivers for these two disks is something I am not sure of. What I know is that I didn't need any specific drivers for my SATA drives, which are both Western Digital. My SATA interface is on the mainboard, and whatever support was required is apparently provided by the nForce chipset drivers. In any case, even before installing those drivers I was able to see the disks and install XP on one of them. In any event this won't matter for you since we have XP on an IDE channel, and the optical on the other IDE channel.

That configuration should allow you to boot and see at least the IDE drives (optical and HD). If you can't see the SATA disks at that point we can work on that seprately.

 

[Drexl]

Have you set the jumpers properly?

 

[Blengineer]

for markbnj:
You are right in understanding my hardware. I would start over but I am not comfortable plugging things in or out.
i can see my optical and my PATA drive.
So the issue is my 2 Serial ATA drives.

My mother board is also an nforce so maybe i need the chipset drivers?? i'll look into that.

I found out the two SATA's are actually configured in Raid 0
do I have to do something with any connectors on the hardware end of things to set them to no longer be in RAID any more? Or is RAID just configured in drivers and bios?

I know what RAID does but I don't know how to configure/unconfigure it. I beleive I don't have any arrays set up right now though and I don't really want them. I just want 3 seperate hard drives.

----

For drexl:
I dunno what jumpers are, are they the power supplies?

I didn't build my computer but it was a custom job from a friend I can't speak to anymore so I'm trying to figure it out myself.

A long time ago all three drives worked...2 in RAID 0 and one just for storage. Now after reformatting a few times they don't work any longer.

 

[Drexl]

There are little pins on an IDE drive that are shorted with a thing called a jumper. These determine whether the drive is master or slave. There is also a cable select option, which allows the master/slave assignments to be determined by the drives' positions on the cable. (SATA drives do not have master/slave assignments and hence no jumpers)

See here: http://www.pchell.com/hardware/masterslaveorcableselect.shtml

Look at the hard drive and you should see a diagram showing you the pins and where the jumpers go for master/slave/cable select.