Question about assigning drive letters to HHD's

[alazeer]

Not sure if you have seen my previous post this past week about my system problems? The good news is that those are gone and my system has booted up and is running pretty good. The problem I'm having now is that the system see's both HDD's I have installed but it only assigned the C; drive letter to one of them but no drive letter to the other. At first in the bios is howed them both as master's on diufferent channels, now that I moved one of the cables it shows them as master & slave on channel 3. Why this is channel 3 you got me?

According to the book it's setup as: SATA2_1 SATA2_3

SATA2_0 SATA2_2 At the end here positioned sideways is SATA2_4

At first I plugged the two cables into 2_0 and 2_1, but that showed them both as master on different channels, I then moved the cable from 2_0 to 2_3 and now it shows them as master & slave on the third (3rd) channel, but does not give a drive letter to the 2nd one? How do I get the system to assign a drive letter to the 2nd HDD? I've never had any problems before with something like this and I'm hoping it's an easy fix?

I hope you can understand what I need from what I wrote?

 

[alazeer]

Not sure if you have seen my previous post this past week about my system problems? The good news is that those are gone and my system has booted up and is running pretty good. The problem I'm having now is that the system see's both HDD's I have installed but it only assigned the C; drive letter to one of them but no drive letter to the other. At first in the bios is howed them both as master's on diufferent channels, now that I moved one of the cables it shows them as master & slave on channel 3. Why this is channel 3 you got me?

According to the book it's setup as: SATA2_1 SATA2_3

SATA2_0 SATA2_2 At the end here positioned sideways is SATA2_4

At first I plugged the two cables into 2_0 and 2_1, but that showed them both as master on different channels, I then moved the cable from 2_0 to 2_3 and now it shows them as master & slave on the third (3rd) channel, but does not give a drive letter to the 2nd one? How do I get the system to assign a drive letter to the 2nd HDD? I've never had any problems before with something like this and I'm hoping it's an easy fix?

I hope you can understand what I need from what I wrote?

 

[hunter315]

is the second drive even formatted? Right click my computer, manage, disk management, and then format the second disk, it will then allow you to assign a drive letter.

 

[alazeer]

They were both formatted to be Boot disc's for some reason? I downloaded a free partition software (EASEUS) and with one click of the mouse (OK maybe two or three ) I had a nice newley reformatted HDD with the drive letter f:, all set now. My system now that I have the new motherboard, cpu and PSU in it is running great! I just hope it stays this way for a good long while!

 

[Paperdoc]

You have SATA drives and, in fact, there is no such thing as a Master or a Slave for SATA systems. HOWEVER, your BIOS is using the older terms from IDE ports, and that is confusing people. For various reasons, one VERY popular way for a BIOS to handle SATA devices is to make them appear to be older PATA devices on IDE ports, and I'm sure that is what is happening in your machine. When it does that, the BIOS starts labeling them using the older names, too, so it really is saying that your first drive on SATA2_1 is EMULATING a PATA drive on IDE Channel 3 in the Master position, and the other is pretending to be the Slave drive on that same Emulated IDE port. There never was anything wrong with your original connection that had them both pretending to be Masters, but on different IDE channels. In the IDE system there always was supposed to be a Master on each channel in use (most boards had two IDE channels); on either channel, a second drive connected has to be the Slave for that channel.

Anyway, you system is working well now. For your information, if you ever want to change the letter name assigned to a drive, this is done in the Disk Management system. If you go there and RIGHT-click on a drive, one of the options allowed is to change its name. You can change it to any name not already in use. If you want, a sequence of such changes can allow you to arrange all your names the way you like, with one exception. Your Boot Drive with the Windows OS on it will always be C: - you can't change that. The only problem with doing this is that some existing shortcuts that point to a file on, for example, the E: drive may need to be altered to the new name of that drive, now called H:, or whatever you did.