(Solved!) Hard disk woes...

[rdev]

Hi all.

My machine is a bit old, and is built around the i845GL chipset. I recently got myself a Seagate ST3200827A IDE hard disk, and installed it as the slave on the primary IDE channel (the master on the same is my older Samsung PL40-SP0411N).

I tried installing Windows XP Professional on my Samsung, keeping the Seagate as secondary storage. On completion, the partitions on the Seagate did make a brief appearance in Explorer. However, once I installed my device drivers and rebooted, they were gone. The startup time was also increased significantly. While the disk did show up in the Device Manager, the Disk Management console or Explorer did not register its presence.

Removing the Samsung, I set the Seagate as master, and reinstalled Windows. Finally, I installed the drivers and did a reboot. This time, the Windows startup screen showed for a long time before the system did a reboot all by itself. On booting a second time, Windows gave me the choice to revert to my 'Last Known Good Config.' I did so to find that only the sound drivers were accepted; all the rest were gone. The partitions were, however, visible this time.

Do you think there is a problem with my drivers...? Both disks work fine with the latest version of Slax, though...

Thanks.

P.S. Sorry for writing such a long post... just wanted to be thorough. One more thing... all the partitions on my disks are formatted using NTFS.

Edited July 31, 2007 by rdev

[Ponch]

Is your XP including SP1 or SP2 ? It is needed to manage partitions that big.

[rdev]

My setup disk has SP1 slipstreamed into it.

[rdev]

Installing the latest drivers seems to have solved the problem.

Thanks anyways.