[harleyd]

Put the windows disc in and used Repair function to get to chkdsk, but it wont see hdd in bios or when i scan system in autodetect in bios, cant get my head round it, only drives it sees are dvd and floppy.

[Tootech]

Don't worry about the hard drive and BIOS bit, can you explain the repair bit and excactly how you got there

If you put the Windows disk in and seletced 'Repair', what other options did you have?

Just trying to work out where you have got to. Repair is normally an option used when you have booted the CD and choose to install Windows.

Also, is your CD a Windows OEM disk, a branded disk or a recovery disk from a manufacturer?

Thanks.

[harleyd]

Success sort off, found out that RAID somehow became active and i disabled it in bios and now ive got 3 sata hardrives! all masters though that i cant seem to change,no jumpers on back of these. I can see all these drives in device manager but only 2 in my computer icon and of these it says 127 gb for both where as i have a 160&320&500 gb drives installed, a black art setting pc's up isnt it!

[Tootech]

Excellent news harley!

Forget the master/slave lark with Serial ATA - they are not setup that way.

The drive you cannot see in My Computer will probably need setting up and formatting.

Go to Control Panel, then Administration Tools, then Computer Management. Look for the Disk Management - you should be able to see your third disk in there. You can set it up as you need it.

Microsoft have a useful Tech Note about it:

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP

The 127GB limit is due to not having the Windows Service Packs installed. I'm guessing your Windows CD is an original, no Service Packs?

Install the Service Packs, then go back to Disk Manager and resize your drives.

Be careful with the drive if you have data on them that you need - dont delete the partitions until you have backed up the data.

Do be aware that you won't be able to resize your active Windows partition.

To do that, you will need a third party tool such as Partition Magic, or build a slipstreamed Cd with the Service Packs already installed, and reinstall Windows.

All very confusing!

Install your service packs and see how you go....

[harleyd]

All done! thanks mate and to the rest of the guys for all your help.

[Tootech]

Your welcome harley

Thanks for letting us know mate, you know where we are if you are stuck......


Tootech.