SATA drives not working in new computer

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Smititty

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Dec 14, 2002
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Alright guys problem time.

I have 2 WD 2500KS drives that hold music, downloads, random junk, the usual. They were working just fine and dandy on my Athlon XP system until it froze and never showed me a screen again. Now I have a new build consisting of an Intel E6300 and a Giga-byte DS3. I've installed the OS on my regural IDE drive and have connected my SATA drives correctly (at least to my knowledge). System works fine and dandy but it will not recognize my SATA drives no matter what port on the motherboard.
Operating system is XP PRO and under disk management one of the drives comes up as unavailable and the other as unreadable.

Any solution to my problems?

Thanks in advance,
Smitty
 
Things I'd check:

1. Drivers needed for SATA controller?
2. Does SATA controller do RAID as well? And does it require proper operational selection in BIOS(IDE or RAID mode) and are there separate drivers for each operational mode to be installed in Windows?
3. Did you possibly jumper the drives, if they are SATAII spec, to SATAI spec on the old mobo and need to jumper them back to SATAII spec? I'm assuming the new board is SATAII capable.
4. Where or how is the one drive coming up unreadable? Disk Management shows it and a dialogue box pops up stating this? Or you can see it in Windows Explorer and then click on the drive to get this message?
 
1: Have downloaded the latest drivers off of giga-byte's website and have installed them.
2: The controller does raid too but I have everything set to IDE mode in the BIOS.
3: SATA = no jumpers.
4: The one drive shows unreadable in Disk Management as the picture shows.
 
Well my bet it has something to with the disks showing up as "dynamic". They must have been setup this way on the old system. I'm not familiar enough to really comment further about how to correctly change them from one PC to another so maybe someone else will. Maybe do a search here or on the internet for more info. Good luck.
 
Not sure if this will work but worth a shot.

Right click on one of the disks. Select "Import Foreign Disks" if available. That might give you some valid volumes. After that right click and see if a "Reactivate" option pops up. I've got a couple dynamic disks set up on my system and every time I reconnect them I usually have to go import them again.
 
No option to import foreign disks. The drive that says offline will try to let me reactivate it but it always gives me an error.
It goes something like this.


In which case I click on reactivate disk and get this.


These drives were not in a RAID array if anyone was thinking that. Just two separate drives.
 
Maybe some more insight here: http://www.mcse.ms/message1076695.html

Looks like to me you may have to use some disk recovery software to get at your data. Since dynamic drives don't have volume letters such a C:\, D:\, etc. that is why they need to be imported and are not readily recongnized by your new install. The dynamic disk database may have been corrupted if the disk was plugged into the motherboard while you did your OS install. You may come to the point of having to zero out the whole drive to be able to get them recognized in Windows. Of course, you'll lose all your data.
 
Slartibartfast said:
So what does the sys event log say?
Click to expand...

INVALID MAGIC NUMBER!!!



I turned around the cables and now both drives say unreadable in disk manager. arg.
 
It might be worth a shot to grab the manufacturer diagnostics and perform a low level of the drives from a prompt.
 
defakto said:
It might be worth a shot to grab the manufacturer diagnostics and perform a low level of the drives from a prompt.
Click to expand...

Would this keep my data in tact, or would I be SOL?
 
So it seems the only viable way to get these drives to work is to wipe everything. Damn.

I downloaded WD's software and it says it can't do shit with dynamic drives and to convert them to basic drives. This sucks.
 
Yeah, my bad on the low level format Idea, forgot you had data you might want.
 
Well I went ahead and just reformatted my drives. Had most of my music backed up onto my external drive so I don't have too much to re-rip. Drives are currently set up in a striped array.
 
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