New SATA DVD-RW Not Recognized by WinXP

[wrawlind]

Hi,

I'm running WinXP Pro. My motherboard is an Albatron Intel865PE/PE Pro that has 2 IDE slots and 2 SATA slots. I have 2 EIDE HDDs (1 Master & 1 Slave) on one of the IDE slots, and 1 DVD-ROM (Master) + 1 DVD-RW (Slave) on the other.

Recently, I tried to add a brand new SATA DVD-RW (the Samsung SH-S203N) to my computer. Not knowing anything about SATA drives, I simply plugged the SATA DVD-RW into one of the SATA slots and expected everything to work itself out. My system BIOS detected the new DVD-RW, and WinXP installed some new IDE controllers, but the OS refused to even acknowledged the new drive's existence. I tried everything, from manually adding new hardware, to changing the BIOS detection settings ("Auto" which automatically configures everything vs "Enhanced" which allows a combination of PATA and SATA with up to 6 drives). Still to no avail.

Then I learned that WinXP doesn't support AHCI so it has to run my SATA DVD-RW in IDE emulation mode. Since XP also has an IDE device limit of 4 devices, I assumed it wasn't recognizing my drive because I was already at the limit (2 HDDs + 1 DVD-ROM as Master + 1 DVD-RW as Slave). So I removed the old IDE DVD-RW slave drive. My BIOS recognized this hardware change, but XP still won't find my SATA DVD-RW. I did notice that both the DVD-ROM and the SATA DVD-RW are labeled "Master" (DVD-ROM on Channel 1, SATA DVD-RW on Channel 2, HHDs on Channel 0) in the system BIOS. Does one need to be "Slave" to the other?

Is there something wrong with my configuration, or is my new drive not working properly?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
-R

 

[solarfinder]

I am unaware if you received an answer on this one or not. If you pull up the device manager, look to see if you can find the drive in the device list. If it's there, right click on it and go to properties. This will show you if there's any errors with the device.

If you do not see it, you will need to go into your bio to see if the mother board can see it. Often times, the sata ports, or additional ports are disabled on the MB, so you will in turn need to activate the drive.

From a hardware standpoint, you may simply have a bad drive. If you can find a separate device or return the other as defective and try the new one, this will definitely identify the device or mb as the culprit. Good luck