but I could be wrong....

New machine (3.5 year old one fried and died *shrug*, that's life) came with a SATA 80gig drive. I wanted to use my 120gig "leftover" Maxtor drive as well. I had another WD 120 gig drive I had to move stuff off of (installing it to a friend's machine as a donation to her non-profit group); put the stuff from it on the Maxtor. Installed the WD to her machine etc. with no problems, but now can't access the Maxtor in my machine.

At the point at which I moved files from the WD to the Maxtor, the SATA 80gig was C:; the Maxtor was D: (on the primary IDE as master, with DVD writer (master) and CD Rom (slave) on the secondary IDE); the WD was G: on the the primary IDE as slave.

Right now, the Maxtor is set up as the only device on the primary IDE, with the jumper selected for master. The SATA is still C:, and the opticals are still on the secondary IDE as before. But I'm still not seeing the drive; and device manager still thinks I've got the linux drive in there (which I did have for a bit, but since I was short on slots and cables I took it out for the time being) - and no matter what I do it doesn't seem to want to uninstall, it's always shown in BIOS setup and device manager.

Help? (And if that's not enough info, just say so and I'll try to provide whatever else is needed....)
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Hi vkaryl, sounds like no fun tonite... do you see the drive if you boot up with a linux live cd like kanotix?

If you see the drive still in the bios if it's not there you probably need to try to reset the bios, with power off.

How to do that varies mobo to mobo.

You may have connected the drives with power cable in? and mobo power on?

If I understand you correctly however, if the bios itself is stuck, you can ignore the operating systems and focus on the bios.

You may need to have it rescan your drives, if that's an option, that varies mobo to mobo as well.
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Hmmm. I'll see if I can find some info on a reset like that. And I'll try the live kanotix trick too. Hey, if the live kanotix trick works, will there be any way to just move the info off that drive to another drive with linux?

Thanks - appreciate the help and ideas.
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Hi vkaryl. It's actually fairly likely that kanotix/linux will be able to deal with reading the drive, linux doesn't actually get it's drive information from the bios as much as from the drive itself. For example, I have an old laptop [THE old laptop I test distros on], that has a 8 gig mobo limit on hard drives, that's all windows sees. But when I put in a 20 gig drive, linux saw it fine.

So short answer: yes, if the drive can be read, kanotix will read it. Kanotix comes with k3b, the cd/dvd burning application, which is fairly easy to use.

So you can burn the data to cd or dvd, then do what you want with it. If you have a partition that is formatted fat32, you can also just copy it to that partition.

It sounds like you confused your motherboard at some point though, a reset is called for I think. That's usually a jumper on older mobos, on newer ones, geek friendly, there's usually a pushbutton on the board itself, that way when geeks overclock it too far and it won't post, they can reset the bios easily to restore default settings.

Consult your mobo documentation to determine which it is.
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Thanks - linux sees the drive but can't access it: says it can't figure out the file system, and none was specified.

Mobo docs: don't have any, unless I can find them online at tigerdirect. I will however look around on the mainboard tomorrow and see what I can find.

I could just bite the damn bullet and send it off to whoever to recover the info - I'm just allergic to paying a couple hundred for it!

[Edit, 6/16 2pm: nev'mind. This was purely a case of terminal stupidity - while messing about with the three drives for various reasons, I thought I'd put the Maxtor with my info back in; however, this was not at all the case - I'd put the Seagate with linux back in (in my space-cadet confused state). Now that the right drive is in the box, it's working just fine.... *sigh* Oh well - no harm no foul....]
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LOL... we've all been there and done that, only we don't tell the clients that, heh heh... believe me, I've done the same. Installing the wrong raid driver comes to mind....
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