V
Vince
Everyone, just wanted to share my install notes for those that may
encounter similar troubles.
I'm using XP SP1 as my OS. My plan was just to replace my almost
failing 8GB drive(sometimes it spins up and sometimes not) with
Seagate's 160GB Barracuda keeping my 40GB as my boot drive.
After installing the drive(connecting it to the primary SATA), I
booted up into XP. The Silicon Image SATA driver that came on the CD
with my ASUS motherboard was loaded and working fine. I could see the
drive fine, the issues I was having was with partitioning it.
Many things did not work for me including Seagate's DiscWizard. Web,
XP or DOS versions all did not work. They either created an error,
hung up the system or just didn't do anything when you tried to load
them.
Tried PartitionMagic 8.0. Could see the drive but could not do
anything with it.
Tried XP Disk Management in Computer Management. Could see the drive
but once again could not do anything with it. I could create a new
volume but it didn't let me choose anything but the NTFS system which
I did not want and the partition size limits seemed unusually low.
I decided to update the Silicon Image SATA with the most recent Sept.
2003 driver for XP. This driver did not work for me, got a yellow
exclamation icon. I used the rollback feature in XP and the driver
was functioning properly once again.
Now ..... I go back into Disk Management and all of the sudden, I have
options I didn't have before like 'Convert to Basic disk'! This is
when it all clicked for me as I was not all that familiar with this
RAID stuff. I just wanted to add the hard drive to my system as
additional space and for some reason XP or the BIOS initialized the
drive as a 'dynamic' disk instead of a 'basic' disk.
Once I converted, everything was behaving as expected. I could
partition with FAT32 to the sizes that I wanted and all is working.
The key thing here was updating the driver, which didn't work for me
and then rolling it back. Just blind luck that I did this and got the
option to convert to basic disk or else I'd still be scratching my
head over what's wrong.
Vince
encounter similar troubles.
I'm using XP SP1 as my OS. My plan was just to replace my almost
failing 8GB drive(sometimes it spins up and sometimes not) with
Seagate's 160GB Barracuda keeping my 40GB as my boot drive.
After installing the drive(connecting it to the primary SATA), I
booted up into XP. The Silicon Image SATA driver that came on the CD
with my ASUS motherboard was loaded and working fine. I could see the
drive fine, the issues I was having was with partitioning it.
Many things did not work for me including Seagate's DiscWizard. Web,
XP or DOS versions all did not work. They either created an error,
hung up the system or just didn't do anything when you tried to load
them.
Tried PartitionMagic 8.0. Could see the drive but could not do
anything with it.
Tried XP Disk Management in Computer Management. Could see the drive
but once again could not do anything with it. I could create a new
volume but it didn't let me choose anything but the NTFS system which
I did not want and the partition size limits seemed unusually low.
I decided to update the Silicon Image SATA with the most recent Sept.
2003 driver for XP. This driver did not work for me, got a yellow
exclamation icon. I used the rollback feature in XP and the driver
was functioning properly once again.
Now ..... I go back into Disk Management and all of the sudden, I have
options I didn't have before like 'Convert to Basic disk'! This is
when it all clicked for me as I was not all that familiar with this
RAID stuff. I just wanted to add the hard drive to my system as
additional space and for some reason XP or the BIOS initialized the
drive as a 'dynamic' disk instead of a 'basic' disk.
Once I converted, everything was behaving as expected. I could
partition with FAT32 to the sizes that I wanted and all is working.
The key thing here was updating the driver, which didn't work for me
and then rolling it back. Just blind luck that I did this and got the
option to convert to basic disk or else I'd still be scratching my
head over what's wrong.
Vince