New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Hi guys,

I had to do a rebuild yesterday as my motherboard and PSU were on their way out. I fitted the new mobo & PSU last night and all was working except that when I go into Windows ,2 of my 3 hard drives do not show as drives in Windows Explorer.

I then went into the Control Panel and chose "Administrative Tools" and opened up the "Disk Management" program.

In there, the 2 hard drives show as "unreadable" and as "Basic" drives rather than "Dynamic".

Please see the screenshot below:-

http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php..._122_707lo.JPG

Does anyone know what would cause these 2 drives to show as unreadable, is it an issue where I havent plugged the SATA cables in the correct slots on the motherboard?

Am I right in thinking that the way things work now is that, the SATA slot on the motherboard determines whether the drive runs as Primary or runs as Slave?

Am I also right in asuming that the windows drive (normally C:\) should always be Disk 0?

On my motherboard (which is a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R) there are a total of 8 SATA slots, 6 of which are an orange colour, and 2 that are Purple.

See mobo pic below:-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/pimg/MB-086-GI_400.jpg

I just need to establish whether this issue is caused by me plugging the SATA cables into the wrong slots on the motherboard. Each of the slots on the mobo has a number besides it, I guess that each SATA number corresponds to the Disk number I see in the Windows Disk Management?

Please help with this guys, Im a bit confused, and concerned considering I have all of my mp3 collection that I've collected since 1998 on 1 of those 2 hard drives (a majority of which is LEGAL, or has been converted from vinyl or CD's that I have purchased - but a lot have been sold on (the vinyls that is).

HALP PLEASE!!!!!

Other than this, the rebuild has gone fine and I have no power issues anymore, yipee!!

Thanks in advance

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Did you previously have the drives in any form of RAID array? Similarly is there any form of RAID setup on your current configuration, or should there be, but the drivers aren't loaded?

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Which disks are connected to which SATA connectors? It could be trying to interpret drives as RAID volumes, check settings in BIOS.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

all sata drives are master iirc. Ideally but not important the OS should have been fitted to drive 0 if all drives are sata that is. Basic is correct dynamic is incorrect and would point to the drives being in an array as rob says
Also dynamic drives are not supported on XP home

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Master/slave has no real meaning for SATA devices - only one device per cable!

I wouldn't make any changes to the drive unless you've exhausted all other possibilities...

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Hi guys, thanks for the quick replies. Seems like I'm posting issues on here every couple of months, bah! lol.

If I convert the drives to basic, they will reformat, there's no other way of doing that through Disk Management - and I obviously dont want to format the drives!!

I will check my BIOS configuration to see if its set up in a way that try's and makes the drives as RAID, which is why its not working. I bloody hope so anyway.

So, Disk 0 should always be the OS drive - I can sort that out. So therefore Disk 0 = SATAII0 slot on the mobo, right?

Will look at my mobo manual in a minute and post... Thx!

---------- Post added at 12:38 ---------- Previous post was at 12:24 ----------

Just an addition, the BIOS recognises all 3 drives, which is a good sign, so it suggests to me that the drives are not *******sed. I've also been able to see contents of the drives through "GetDataBack", so its accessible, just something doesnt seem right.

In terms of the 2 other hard drives, it wouldnt matter what order they are in, correct?

Also, on my motherboard, are there any of those SATA slots that are orange, that are specifically for RAID? my mobo manual suggets there isnt .

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

normally its the purple ones that are raid on a gigabyte board as they use a different chipset, are all the mobo drivers installed?

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Yes, all mobo drivers were installed from CD when I booted into windows. I've rebooted the PC since but this "unreadable" issue still occurs.

The SATA cables are plugged in to the yellow slots, but I need to change them around when I get home, as they are not in 0, 1 and 2.

I'm hopeful that the BIOS isnt configured correctly which is why the drives wont show properly...bloody hope thats the case anyway.

Just looking in my mobo manual....these are the BIOS settings

"SATA RAID / AHCI Mode"
I can choose either 'Disabled' / 'AHCI' / or 'RAID'

"SATA AHCI Mode"
I can choose either 'Disabled' / 'AHCI'

"SATA Port0-3 Native Mode"
I can choose either 'Disabled' or 'Enabled'

"SATA Port0-1 Native Mode"
I can choose either 'Disabled' or 'Enabled'

"Onboard SATA/IDE Device"
I can either Enable or Disable this - description says "Enables or disabled the IDE and SATA Controllers integrated in the GIGABYTE SATA 2 chip - Default Enabled

"Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode" (GIGABYTE SATA2 Chip)
I can chooe either 'IDE' / 'AHCI' or 'RAID/IDE'

Any advice on what I should set, am I right in saying that any SATA non-RAID stuff should be set to "IDE" and not AHCI?

Thanks guys.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Hence the reason for me putting if you get nowhere ;)

---------- Post added at 13:05 ---------- Previous post was at 13:02 ----------

AHCI basically is the advanced features of Sata such as hot swap and command queing. It does not set the drive to either raid or none raid. I would set IDE/AHCI. Is there nowhere with a JBOD setting this is basically Just a Bunch Of Drives
Just set everything you can to none raid

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

okay, so therefore I choose AHCI, yep?

What about that native mode stuff, should I leave it enabled or disable it?

And for the onboard ctrl mode should I choose IDE or AHCI?

I'm confuzzled! :(

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

I would yes. I do not know why the drives are wrong though. Normally even if a raid controller was set to raid and you put 2 drives on the controller and didnt set up an array they would normally just automatically set it up as JBOD. The only time ive not seen this is with my asus board that has a dedicated raid only chipset that you have to connect 2 drives to and either stripe them or mirror them. If your drives were not in an array before this error is new to me so its trial and error. I would set everything you can up as none raid in bios and see

Also are all the drives on the none gigabyte chipset? ie all yellow

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Did you reinstal WinXP and also Sp2

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

no I havent mate, do you think its advisable?

I shall check my BIOS settings and also the SATA cables being in the right order first (just got in from work so will do that now).

Thing is, I don't want to lose any of my current Windows etc, can I just "repair" the installation? or should I install afresh?

Do you think that the reinstall on XP SP2 will do the trick?

I'm still a bit unsure on what BIOS settings to use...

zingle - I didnt understand the last bit of your note, please explain :)

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

your sata ports on your mobo have 2 chipsets. One pair coloured blue and the other 3 pairs coloured yellow use the yellow

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

I'm using yellow for all 3 drives.

Hmm, do you think this mobo could be RAID only? :(

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Unless you were making a motherboard specifically for servers, you wouldn't make it RAID only. You are sure that in the BIOS there is no configuration enabled for any RAID settings?

Were the HDs formatted in a way that your current OS can actually read, i.e NTFS, FAT32, etc?

If all else fails, if your recovery software can read the drives, go out and get yourself another drive, maybe an external one, and copy stuff over to it.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

I bought 1 of these 2 drives about 1.5 months ago, and its a 1TB drive. I still can't get my head round why it would suddenly stop working!

I have to be honest, I'm still not 100% sure what I set my BIOS settings mentioned on page 1 to.

So, itsn ot like I've bought a new motherboard that only supports RAID?

The hard drives are in use and were not formatted. They were the correct file system NTFS.

Cheers

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

I'm not saying you won't be able to use the drives again, after a format. I'm suggesting a way out of the problem which is recovery to an external drive. OK a 1 TB external drive might well be costly, but in the absence of any other solution, if the data is important, it might be worth it.

I have to say that the only time I've had a major concern over data was when a RAID type setting was in use, that corrupted, leaving me without access to the drives. RAID relies on hardware and software. Too many permutations for things messing up.

Any important data needs to be backed up. You can't rely on just one Hard Disk.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

have you set everything you possibly can to any option other than raid? where is the machine they come out of?

You have not got a raid only board as you os is on one drive.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

very strange goings on at the mo, still cant work out why windows doesnt like these hard drives but at least it recognises them being there in a way, so I can recover the data and move it to another hard drive, then convert the hard drive in question and hey presto.

I've just installed a 500gb hard drive which was being unused, I've installed XP on it, Im now going to recover my old 500gb files and move them across, once thats done I'll format the old 500gb hard drive and convert it to what XP requests, that should then make the drive active again I presume?

Very strange anyhow, truly bizarre!! :S

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

The answer is 42! Try following the instructions here: http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelaz...sic-Disks.aspx

or failing that you could try:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236086

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Thanks Strzelecki, will give that a go!

I'm running GetDataBack now which has recognised all files on the "unreadable" disk and I'm copying all of the files over to the 500gb that I've put in specifically to backup (that also has a fresh install of Windows on it).

I will give this a go on the 1TB drive however. Thanks very much.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Do you have Sp1 or 2 already on as a Google came up showing this corrected this problem for someone.Assume you deleted all previous chipset drivers etc and reinstalled new ones for your motherboard

---------- Post added at 09:30 ---------- Previous post was at 09:27 ----------

Sorry just read you have installed fresh WinXP

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

got sp2 installed mate.

and yes, intalled mobo drivers from cd, and downloaded updates from the internet, but still get the "unreadable" message.

Will try that '42' thing Strzelecki posted next.

In the mean time, incase that doesnt work and loses my data, Im backing things up using GetDataBack and moving it to my new 500gb windows drive.

Re: New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.
 

Problem now fixed, thank you VERY much Stzelecki! your tip worked a treat, thank you very very much, windows now recognises all of the drives :)