*Solved* - Windows 2000 doesn't list a couple of my hard drives in Disk Management

[Mears]

EDIT - problem resloved by updating to via's latest 4-1

I have a couple of drives on a raid controller and a single drive on my primary controller. I just added two hard drives to the secondary ide controller. They are detected by my bios and show up in device manager under "disk drives", but no drive letters were assigned to them and neither drive is listed under disk management. Any idea why this is?

 

[ohnnyj]

Do you see any Unallocated space in DM?

 

[Mears]

No, no drives, nothing. Just the single drive on my primary controller and my array on the RAID controller. I just tried one drive on the secondary controller, and it isn't even showing up.

 

[ribbon13]

is the second controller disable in device manager?

 

[ohnnyj]

Try adding just one drive to the secondary IDE (as a master). You do have one drive as master and another as slave right?

 

[Mears]

I've already tried adding each drive by itself as a master. Secondary controller is showing up as being healthy. As I mentioned, the drives are both showing up in device manager, but for whatever reason they are not showing up in disk management. Thus, I can't assign drive letters to them.

 

[Mears]

Here is an interesting thing I discovered. If I put a cd-rom drive on the sec. controller it shows up. With a cd-rom as the master, I am also able to add the hard drives as slave. This really makes no sense to me.

 

[Zepper]

Are the drives partitioned and formatted? Nevermind... they should show up in disk management anyway. Try setting all drives to Cable Select and use an 80 wire cable, blue end to mobo. The drive you put on the end of the cable will be primary, middle will be secondary on that channel.

.bh.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had a wierd issue recently, where one of my optical drives started showing up intermittently. I have an Afreey 56X reader, and a Lite-On 52X writer, on my mobo's primary master IDE channel. I put a CD that I burned in my Benq CD-RW (on secondary channel), into the Lite-On for scanning with CDDoctor, went fine, and then put it into my Afreey for read-speed testing, and it kept re-seeking, couldn't "find" anything on the disc, and eventually, after timing out, my Lite-On failed to be detected properly. I fiddled with Device Manager, uninstalled/reinstalled/etc., managed to get them both re-detected for a bit, but still couldn't read a CD in the Afreey, lost the Lite-On again.. what a mess.

I finally decided to crack the case open, and double-checked the jumpers (replaced just in case), unplugged and re-plugged the IDE cables, and unplugged and re-plugged the power molexes. The splitter that was powering both of them, was a little bit loose, due to a case fan with a molex passthrough that I had added, the last time that my case was open. I suspect that was likely the cause, as I crimped the molex sockets a bit better, and put everything back together, and now everything is running fine. I think that the +12V running to the motors on the opticals on that splitter, weren't getting good contact and solid power. Now discs spin up and read fine in both drives.

So I wonder if something similar could be at issue here?

 

[Mears]

This is NOT a jumper issue. Besides, I already mentioned they are being detected by the bios AND show up in device manager. There is something else going on. A further experiment showed that this same behavior is replicated on the primary ide controller.

 

[Mears]

Problem resolved by updating to VIA's latest 4 in 1 drivers.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Mears
Problem resolved by updating to VIA's latest 4 in 1 drivers.

Interesting.. but a bit odd. What mobo/system chipset is that? Did you install the IDE miniport driver, as part of the 4-in-1 installation? I've found that the Via IDE miniport caused all kinds of problems with CD burning, on my KT400/8235 mobo, so I use the default MS IDE port driver. I'm honestly a bit surprised that the Via drivers would be required for the IDE devices on that port to be detected at all.