2 SATA drives on a P4C800-E Deluxe mobo - but not in RAID???

[Ol' Mucky Terrahawk]

Building a new computer . . .

I hooked up one WD Raptor to my P4C800-E Deluxe mobo and installed windows XP fine. I hooked up my other WD Raptor on SATA 2, but it doesn't show up in windows. Anyone know why?

I'm not trying to do a RAID configuration - I want them seperate. So, they are not on SATA_RAID1 and SATA_RAID2, they are on the plain ol' SATA1 and SATA2. Other than that, all the basic componenets (mobo, CPU, RAM, floppy, DVD Drive) of the new computer appear to be working fine.

It might be jumper settings, but I can't find a jumper settings chart for the Raptor. I might just have to go RAID . . .

[muisejt]

you need to create a partition before you'll see it in My Computer

[Ol' Mucky Terrahawk]

Do I? On my present system, nothing is partitioned, and I plugged in 3 HDs (2 GXP60's and a WD 80GB) and all of them appeared in "My Computer" without having to do anything. Then, I just formatted them there. Does it have something to do with SATA?

So, I need to partition my main system HD so I can see the 2nd HD? That doesn't make sense to me . . . I suppose I could take the blank drive and put it on SATA1 and re-install windows on that, but partition it first. (?)

[muisejt]

new hard drives don't come partitioned. if you go into Disk Management it should show the drive there and allow you to partition it

[Ol' Mucky Terrahawk]

cool - I think I figured it out, it's formatting now - thanks muisejt

It's wierd though - I swear on my present computer I put in a new HD (right out of the box) and it instantly appeared in "My computer", then I right-clicked and choose format. Oh well . . . it was a couple years ago so I'm probably wrong.

Also, after all these years, I never knew about disk management - whoops! ;) I'm curious about dynamic v. basic disks now - I'll start a new thread . . .

[ParrotHead]

Why dont you want them in raid?

[Ol' Mucky Terrahawk]

You know, I almost put them in RAID. But I wanted to have 2 seperate drives of that size - one for system/programs, and one for current audio files. I figured I could of put them in RAID, then partitioned them back to the same size they are now, but I hate messing with partitions. The main reason is I don't want one of those drives becoming inoperable if the other goes down. I can't afford to lose the audio files due to some system error. Anyway, when I reinstall windows in about a year (regular maintenance) I might go ahead and switch them over to RAID . . .