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Mada123Flag for United States of America

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Missing Hard drives

Reinstalled Windows 2000 Pro last night. Now I have missing drives. We installed the sata drivers at set up, so I don't think that's the problem.

The system seem to see them somewhere because of the way my drive lettering is going:

C: Partition of hard drive 1 (Maxtor 250 gig) - Has the operating system on it and is working.
D: Partition of hard drive 1 - Missing
E: Partition of hard drive 1 - Missing
F: 250 gig Western Digital, no partitions - Missing
G and H are opticle drives

When I turn on the external hard drive, it labels itself J as it did when all the drives were working.

I read somewhere, during our extensive search for the answer, that we need to go into Bios (which, by the way, doesn't recognize the drives) and set it to read Sata drives. How do I do this? I know that I need to hit delete at start up to get there, and I can see Primary and Secondary slave on the first page. When I click on secondary, all it talks about is autodetecting IDE drives.

Thanks in advance for any help.
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zephyr_hex (Megan)
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have you loaded the SATA drivers?
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ASKER

Yea, at set up. Any other ideas? Drive C is sata and is recognized.
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What motherboard do you have?  Some require the SATA controller to be enabled, and it sounds like your boot drive is an IDE, and the others are SATA.
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ASKER

Motherboard is a an Asus A7N8X Deluxe. Boot drive is a Sata. It all worked before the reinstall and we've never updated the bios.
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OK, so we checked the hard drives.

Apparently, we have 3 drives. A 60 gig IDE and 2 250 gig SATAs. The operating system loaded to the IDE. When we took that out, the system wouldn't boot at all.

We believe that the original operating system was on a partition of one of the SATA drives and might still be there. Does this make sense? So when we reinstalled, it automatically installed to the IDE, overwriting everything on that drive and left the original operating system alone.

So, now we have 2  250 gig SATAs that aren't recognized at all, and one might have another copy of Windows 2000 on it.

Originally, there was a RAID thing that came up during boot, but it doesn't come up anymore. Could this be the problem?



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ASKER

Resolved: All I did was enable RAID. Go figure.
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GranMod

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