A couple of weeks ago I started a thread about adding four 200 gig hard drives to a system I built back in October.

I started with 1 Maxtor 80GB SATA HD drive and 1 CD writer. I was going to add 4 Maxtor 200GB IDE HD drives and a dual-layer DVD writer. The system is based on a Gigabyte GA-700N Pro 2 board, feature rich with a pretty good BIOS and on-board RAID. Jeff reminded me about enabling big lba and off I went, first making sure I had a couple of round IDE cables in hand to facilitate air movement inside the box.

I'm not going to be able to recount all of the trials and travails, let's just say I wound up going around in circles.

Day One
Broke down the system, moved it to my workbench (coffee table covered by a flattened cardboard box), borrowed the LCD monitor from another desktop (couldn't think of moving the 19-inch Trinitron). Opened the case, decided to start top down, so first pulled the necessary wires to get access and installed the DVD writer. Made sure the master/slave jumpers were correct, connected to the secondary IDE channel, applied power, checked BIOS, booted in W2K, tested the drives -- all good, this is going to be a piece of cake.

Pulled the HD cage and plopped the 4 200GB HDDs in. Now I notice the blurb about 'cable select' versus master/slave IDE jumper settings. Decided if the feature is there, I might as well use it. Only thing, all IDE devices would have to be set to cable select. Okay, bite the bullet, pull the two optical drives, change the jumpers and reinstall them.

Since I've read about some folks having problems installing large drives on some boards (despite the LBA fix), I'm going to take things slow, so I decide to first work with only two drives. I connect the cables, apply power, BIOS recognizes them (Hey, this is a cinch!) boot into W2K -- and they ain't there!

Stretch a cable over to get to the Internet. Do some digging and find that you first have to partition the drives for Windows to mount them (My Computer > Manage > Storage > Disk Management). I decide to use Maxtor's MaxBlast software. Simple, quick, found the drives and had them setup in a matter of moments.

Rebooted. And that's when the problems started. (And this is where I start to get a bit hazy, I've been around the corner so many times, my head is still spinning.)

BIOS recognized the drives but Windows didn't, they were no where to be found. Booted back into BIOS, checked settings, changed settings, enabled this, disabled that. Surfed the net, read countless posts and possible fixes. Visited Gigabyte site, Maxtor site, AMD site. Reconfigured BIOS countless times. Sometimes got an "Errors starting OS" message after the "Verifying pool data" step. Sometimes got the blue screen of death.

Endless fixes with only so much time. Had to get the system back to usable so I could get at least an hour of real work in. Time to call it quits for the day.

Day Two
Sometime during the night I had a flash: I'm installing multiple HDDs without enabling the on-board RAID. Hmm, maybe, though I'm not planning on using it, this board needs that even if it's just set to "Normal." Anything's worth a shot.

Open the box to reconnect the HDDs. Realize I forgot the pair I was working with yesterday. Pick two, hook 'em up, boot up. BIOS recognizes the master but not the slave and is very, very slow. Enable RAID and continue through W2K boot. This time I decide to partition and format the drives through Windows, not MaxBlast. Windows finds the master, I partition and format it (Whew, this is a looong process), reboot and -- BIOS still does not recognize the slave and is again very, very slow. After finally booting into Windows, it's now not recognized the master.

Turns out to be another long day of this and that, a note to Gigabyte support (still waiting for reply), all interspersed with brief forways of returning the system to it's original configuration so I can get some work done.

Day Three
I decided that this is it, I have to get things up and working, can't keep futzing around with stuff, wasting time and neglecting my work. If I have to bite the bullet, I will.

Spend a couple of hours rechecking everything. Are there any steps I missed? Did I make sure to try this setting in conjunction with that? Tried another fix from Maxtor, adding another set of IDE jumpers (the 'CLJ' fix). Tried putting the drives in pure master/slave configuration (remembering to disconnect the optical drives so there would be not conflict). Waited for a reply from Gigabyte.

No luck. Bit the bullet and walked over to CompUSA to pick up an ATA PCI card. Spent about an hour mucking about getting the sucker in (you run out of finger space quickly with five hard drives stuffed inside a box), hooked everything thing up, powered on...

Voila! No muss, no fuss. It worked.

Well, almost. The PCI card recognized 3 of the HDDs. A bit of back and forth with IDE and power cables confirmed that the slave not recognized the day before is a dud. Have a return request in to zipzoomfly.

So, that's it. Three day of headaches without finding out exactly what the problem is. One thing I realized along the way is that one symptom can be caused by different problems; unless you have had the experience of fixing a specific problem, it's basically impossible to differentiate the possible causes -- you just keep going down different dark alleys, not knowing if and when you're following the right one.

I knew about the PCI card solution from Day One, Maxtor mentioned it as it's 'last chance.' I'm stubborn enough to not do that at first, I really wanted to get the system working the way it was supposed to, but my first priority after all the heartache was to get everything back up and working.

Yeah, it was a piece of cake alright!
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I can't be positive, but it looks like you may have skipped some steps.

Hopefully you had at least Windows 2000 service pack 3 installed, ideally 4. If you didn't, you could have major issues, since anything less doesn't support the largelba fix.

When doing this kind of testing, use the quick format option, otherwise you'll be waiting hours for the drives to format. Once it's all working you can go back and do a full NTFS format, start it when you're doing something else, do them all.

First, and this is the biggy: anytime you have a problem with drives not getting recognized, make sure you are not using old cables. Some cables may appear to work, but don't when you use them on harddrives, I've had that problem with a cable that I thought was good because it ran a cdrom fine, but wouldn't run hard drives, in fact, it destroyed 3. New cable solved drive recognition error instantly.

Assuming new cables, assuming that the largLBA fix is in place [gigabyte boards have no problems supporting large drives by the way].

Cable select is a bad option, always better to force the issue by explicitly declaring it. Set all drives to correct master/slave position.

Plug in. Reboot, go into bios, allow biios to detect all drives. this is importont: save biios settings. Failure to save the settings can result in failure to recognize drives in windows.

If the bios isn't regnizing the drives, you may need to update the bios. The gigabyte board has a very cool windows tool that lets you update bios through windows. Make absolutely 100% certain that you write down the exact board number, including subversion information for this step. Update bios, reboot. Check again.

In bios, make sure the ide raid is set to normal, as you did. Boot into windows. Go to admin tools, disk manager, see if disks appear. If they appear, format them.

Once disks are formatted they should appear. Using a pci card is not a good option, you get IRQ conflicts frequently which can dramatically slow down system performance, it's much better using the native board ide/raid channels. This is also a problem with SATA, by the way, since it shares the standard PCI bus. This won't be the case in the future.

If you aren't seeiing the hard disks in disk manager, there is a problem at that point, probably a bios issue is my guess, although it's hard to tell. I just installed 2 200 gig hard drives on that board, but in raid 0 off the ide raid, and it worked fine, once I figured out the lba issue. Since you used a utility, you want to go into the registry and make absolutely sure that the correct registry setting was made, although that shouldn't have prevented the drives from being spotted, that would just show the wrong drive capacity, 137 gig.

There's also a chance of disk error, you want to go into administror tools, event viewer, and look for disk error red flags. Disk error red flags are extremely serious errors, and need to be resolved.

Let me know if any of this helped.

NOTE: I have had an issue with gigabyte boards, or the drives, hard to say which, not treating the master/slave properly, changing those around until the stuff was recognized solved the problem, that's an error. Don't know if the latest bios upgrade has fixed that, but I've only seen that error once.
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