SATA drives not recognized in Windows XP ?!?

Hi,

I have an Asus P5AD2-E premium motherboard, 5 Seagate 200-Gig Sata
HDs, no floppy, one dvd-rw, and 1 gig of RAM...

Originally, I had installed Windows XP Media Center Edition on the
first HD, and used the other 4 HD's as a RAID-5 volume (through
software RAID-5, as per a Tom's hardware article...).

Everything was working fine...

Then I wanted to install 2 tv-tuners, which were not in the machine
when I originally installed XP. They seemed to install correctly, but
I could never get them to work inside Media Center. After many
unsuccessful attempts, I deciced to do a complete reinstall of XP MCE.

When I reinstalled, strangely, Windows never offered me to install on
one of the 4 drives which were part of the RAID setup in my original
install... But since I wanted to reinstall XP on the same drive as it
was originally, I just chose that drive and went ahead with the
installation.

Now, I have a working XP MCE, but the 4 SATA drives are not recognized
anymore. They are not in Windows Explorer, and they are not in Disk
Management either. They do show up in the BIOS though.

One strange thing is that somehow, Windows Explorer shows two floppy
drives (A: and B, and, well, I have no floppy installed on that
machine.

I'm guessing that XP is somehow misinterpreting the SATA drives as
floppies, but then again, why 2 floppies when I have 0 floppy drives
and 4 HDs (in addition to the other HD on which XP is installed)...

Obviously, I'm looking for an answer as to how to get the hard drives
back ! Of course, I would love to get the data on them as well, but
I'm starting to thing that this will be very difficult :-)

Thanks for your help...

In article ,
(Snake Djip) wrote:

Hi,

I have an Asus P5AD2-E premium motherboard, 5 Seagate 200-Gig Sata
HDs, no floppy, one dvd-rw, and 1 gig of RAM...

Originally, I had installed Windows XP Media Center Edition on the
first HD, and used the other 4 HD's as a RAID-5 volume (through
software RAID-5, as per a Tom's hardware article...).

Everything was working fine...

Then I wanted to install 2 tv-tuners, which were not in the machine
when I originally installed XP. They seemed to install correctly, but
I could never get them to work inside Media Center. After many
unsuccessful attempts, I deciced to do a complete reinstall of XP MCE.

When I reinstalled, strangely, Windows never offered me to install on
one of the 4 drives which were part of the RAID setup in my original
install... But since I wanted to reinstall XP on the same drive as it
was originally, I just chose that drive and went ahead with the
installation.

Now, I have a working XP MCE, but the 4 SATA drives are not recognized
anymore. They are not in Windows Explorer, and they are not in Disk
Management either. They do show up in the BIOS though.

One strange thing is that somehow, Windows Explorer shows two floppy
drives (A: and B, and, well, I have no floppy installed on that
machine.

I'm guessing that XP is somehow misinterpreting the SATA drives as
floppies, but then again, why 2 floppies when I have 0 floppy drives
and 4 HDs (in addition to the other HD on which XP is installed)...

Obviously, I'm looking for an answer as to how to get the hard drives
back ! Of course, I would love to get the data on them as well, but
I'm starting to thing that this will be very difficult :-)

Thanks for your help...

Have you repeated the steps in the article ?

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/.../raid5-01.html

Paul

Paul wrote:
In article ,
(Snake Djip) wrote:


....


Have you repeated the steps in the article ?

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/.../raid5-01.html

Paul


Yes I have.