Help! No drive letter being assigned to hard disk

[adrian]

Hi, I've just installed a Promise Controller card UDMA/ATA100 PCI and an IBM 75GXP UDMA100 drive. The controller card successfully installed no problem. I boot up and the controller card sees the new hard drive. But I go into Windows and it has not given the new drive a letter. I have no way of accessing the new drive. Do I need to do something else? I first made the drive master but that didnt work so I made it slave, which one should it be? It is my second drive so it should be slave, but it is the only drive on the controller card so maybe it should be master?

I go into device manager and it shows the new drive but I go into properties and the drive letter is blank and greyed out. The disconnect and sync transfer boxes are ticked.

btw I got no instructions or drivers with my new drive, is that normal?

Any help appreciated


My system specs are
PIII 700
Intel 440BX AGPset

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by adrian on 01/16/01 03:49 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

Have you formatted the drive, I am assuming that as you have booted up and have win running then you must have 2 hdd's in your sys, Windows cannot recognise the drive if it is not formatted(Preferably in Fat32 so you can use LBA), to do this you will need a boot disk with the format command on it


"Its full of stars"

 

[adrian]

No I haven't formatted the drive. So I create a boot disk and boot off it, and type format <drive letter> but I dont have a drive letter for the new drive?

I do have 2hdds, one is my old ide with the OS. Should the new drive be master or slave?

 

[Guest]

>>No I haven't formatted the drive. So I create a boot disk and boot off it, and type format <drive letter> but I dont have a drive letter for the new drive?<<

You must partition the disk before formatting as well even if it will be all one partition. Fdisk program can be used for this. Enable large disk support if it ask. More than likely your old drive is device 1 and you will need to tell fdisk to switch devices once you start the program (option 5 in fdisk). Use option 4 to get a picture of the drives and partitions fdisk sees. It's very important you don't partition over your old drive. Once you are on the right hard drive, select option 1. It'll ask if you want to use all the space, say yes. Reboot and format what should be drive D:

>>I do have 2hdds, one is my old ide with the OS. Should the new drive be master or slave?<<

master (it is on the controller by itself)


***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***

 

[Crashman]

I'm fairly sure that you'll need to get the drivers for your card. Been there, done that.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

>>The controller card successfully installed no problem.<<

The failure to mention partioning and formatting and the inclusion of the above would suggest drivers have been installed. Not to mention how do I partition, format, and install Win9x on a drive off a controller card if drivers are a must in every situation? I've done it frequently so I'd say that must not be the case, almost certainly in this situation.



***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***

 

[Crashman]

I am fairly sure that in order to make the controller bootable you have to disable the onboard controller, in which case the PCI controller is used as a standard device. Windows and dos mode are different in the way they handle it. If I'm not mistaken, I actually loaded a hard drive with one of these cards, from the cd, only to have the CDROM and the secondary controller on the card dissapear after windows loaded. I suppose the primary controller would have been gone to except that the computer booted off it. Anyway, drivers required for Windows, because Windows is stupid.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

If you will read the post.. you'll notice he isn't trying to boot from the controller card aaaaaaaaaaaaaand he even mentioned not formatting the drive. (Are you post padding?? If so.. suicide is painless)

>>I am fairly sure that in order to make the controller bootable you have to disable the onboard controller<<

Nope.. Using integrated promise and highpoint controllers along with the standard integrated controllers at the same time while booting from the promise or highpoint would not be possible in this case.

>>I actually loaded a hard drive with one of these cards, from the cd, only to have the CDROM and the secondary controller on the card dissapear after windows loaded<<

sounds like you are saying you had a CD-Rom hooked to peripheral controller. Cd-Roms are notorious for quirkiness off of ATA66/100 controllers.




***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***

 

[Crashman]

Well, I thought it would be nice to have a second controller card one day, so I put in a brand new promise controller and windows could not identify it until I loaded the drivers. It wouldn't even detect the hard drive or CD on it. Later, I pulled the card and put it into another system. Booted off a floppy, CD device was detected, and everything worked well enough in dos mode to load the CDROM. BUT when Windows was done loading, the secondary controller and the CD rom that was on it disappeared. So I hooked the CDROM up to the primary controller and it worked well enough to finish installing software. But Windows still would not detect the secondary controller and had the primary controller in compatability mode or something. So, I loaded the driver on that system and Viola, the controller appeared as it should have and the secondary controller was detected. So I put the CDROM back on the secondary again and it now worked. So like I was saying about Windows not properly detecting the card-I think windows drivers are not applicable to this product, the Promise drivers are the only thing that seemns to work. The thing is, using it as the boot drive's controller forces dos to recognise it. So I believe that it does not work at all in Windows unless you either load the drivers or boot off of it.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

Are you running TweakUI? If so it may be that you have unchecked the new drives letter consignment in the My Computer Options. It happened to me and took me ages to figure out the problem!! All you have to do is recheck the box and restart.

 

[adrian]

I'm fine now guys, I did post a reply that everything was sorted but it seems to have been deleted.

Chord was right, I just needed to run fdisk and format. Easy when you know how.

One thing though, when I shut down now sometimes I get the message "Error: Not enough room for enviroment, press any key to continue."

Weird but no big deal. I did do a memory upgrade recently its possible its related to that rather than the new hard drive.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by adrian on 01/19/01 01:22 PM.</EM></FONT></P>