Twin Seagate 750Gb drives on an AW9D-MAX bootup problem!

[Cromlech]

As well as the two Seagate drives, I have two Raptor 74Gb drives, and two Maxtor 300Gb drives installed, which all work fine.

I have tried connecting my two new drives to the mobo in a number of different combinations. I have tried booting with both, connected to the various SATA ports on the mobo, and also on an additional SATA controller (Newlink PC-E 2x SATA 1x IDE from JMICRON). I have also tried connecting just one of the drives at a time, on the various ports, but still no luck. I recieve the following bootup message, after choosing to boot windows:

WINDOWS COULD NOT START BECAUSE OF A COMPUTER DISK HARDWARE CONFIGURATION PROBLEM. COULD NOT READ FROM THE SELECTED BOOT DISK. CHECK BOOT PATH AND DISK HARDWARE. PLEASE CHECK THE WINDOWS DOCUMENTATION ABOUT HARDWARE DISK CONFIGURATION AND YOUR HARDWARE REFERENCE MANUALS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

If I disconnect the new Seagate drives from the ports, then everything boots up wonderfully. Does anyone have any clue as to what the problem might be? I was so happy to receive my lovely shiny new drives, but now I feel like an ass.

[arthurleung]

Remove the two drives, go into BIOS and check the harddrive boot order. THEN add the two drives, make sure the 4 old drives are still in the same order, WITH the 2 new drives in the last place.

I think the problem is, you've installed your windows with 4 disks on, the boot partition may be on the maxtor 300g but pointed to the raptor (i.e. hdd1 point to hdd4)

If you add the new drive, and the new drive becomes hdd4 then windows will not boot.

[Cromlech]

I'm not sure that I got that 100% (I'm thick), but I am going to have a little poke around to see what the boot order is.

When I have the new drives connected, I have mostly been retrying them on SATA ports 6 and 7, or on a PCI-E add on controller, and they do not show up in the main bios boot-up screen, but in their own sections, i.e the screen after for silicon image, or the one after that for the add on controller.

I hope I am making sense, but my tiny mind is easy to overwhelm.

[Cromlech]

Righty ho. Now it boots up just fine, but I have to select Windows XP Pro x64 in order to get to my x32 Windows XP Pro.

I can live with that.

Under 'My Computer', the drives do not show up in the hard drive section, or elsewhere, for that matter.

However, the device manager can see them, but thinks that they are SCSI drives.

Hmm. :/

[Cromlech]

All I needed to do was assign and format it in one of the computer management thingys (technical term ).

Thanks for the input arthurleung, I am such a noob.


Now all I need to do is wait ages for them to be formatted!

[aidanjt]

That's why I hate the way Windows hijacks the bootloader and makes it completely unobvious to fix it when you fiddling with the hardware a bit.

[Cromlech]

Haha, yeah. I like buying and physically installing hardware, but when it comes to the software side of things, I curl up in a corner and cry.