Reader Rick Goodier wrote again to say:
Hi, Terry.
You were right. I finally had to download a driver, oddly called a Raid
driver, from the soyo website, install it, and then the drive was
recognized. But I made a bit of a mistake. In the xp pro disk
management screen, I told the computer to initialize the drive (correct)
as a dynamic disk (incorrect). I still don’t know exactly what a dynamic
disk is, but I am currently in the middle of a format, which looks as
though it will take several hours (300 GB). I tried to use acronis
migrate easy with the disk in its dynamic form, but this wouldn’t work,
told me the drive I was installing to was way too small (I am trying to
transfer a four partition, 120 GB disk to the new one). In the past, I
seem to remember, that all I had to do was initialize a disk, and then I
could copy partitions to it without formating, but maybe I am remembering
that wrong, as it sure won’t work today.
A “dynamic disk” is a no-no. That’s windows term for a new style system, which even supports having a single pretend disk partition that spans multiple hard drives..
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044/
As I’ve mentioned recently at a Cajun Clickers meeting, that’s like the old Unix operating systems treated multiple disk drives. They also could "logically" span volumes over multiple physical hard drives. Of course, they also had full-time operators who backed up all the data every day!
And, a final message from Rick:
So, anyway, I have the drive recognized in windows thanks to your advice,
and when I get it formatted, I hope to copy the partitions over and be
ready to go, go, go.My compliments on your powers of education . Sure did the trick for
me.Best,
Rick
Great; glad I could help.
You can help me by making your Amazon.com and Buy.com purchases (assuming you do them) via the search boxes on my site. The commissions are tiny but they eventually add up.
Also, tell your friends about my site and newsletter. I want MANY more subscribers and visitors to my Terry’s Computer Tips site. There’s a lot of good information there, including archives of all the old newsletters. Many of the older newsletters have been converted to web page articles, but not all.
Terry
By the way, if you want to build a new computer and install Windows on a SATA drive, you’ll have to load the SATA driver into Windows. Sortly after you boot the Windows CDROM, the screen will tell you to insert your "RAID" hard drive controller driver, if you have one.
This is the time when you need to insert your SATA driver CD and install the driver from it. Without that driver, you won’t be able to install successfully onto the SATA drive.
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