Gaming Madness Community Forum

ok so i recieved all of my computer parts and put everything together last night. i have three hard drives that i want to use. the problem is that i couldnt install vista and get it working until i un-plugged two of those drives so as not to confuse the installation process. now that vista is installed, i dont really know how to make these hard drives work. if i plug them back in on the mobo, it wont boot. (i think its because the bios is confused as to which hard drive to look at. all three are identical)

ANY SUGGESTIONS??

I have no idea.... im just throwing this out there but maybe your power supply cant handle those extra 2 harddrives with everything else you have so it wont boot in order to protect it self from short circuiting? Again, just a guess cause I have no idea whats wrong. I would call tech support.

Paintball wrote:I have no idea.... im just throwing this out there but maybe your power supply cant handle those extra 2 harddrives with everything else you have so it wont boot in order to protect it self from short circuiting? Again, just a guess cause I have no idea whats wrong. I would call tech support.

Painttt makes a good point - what is the voltage on your power supply?

Also, what kind of interface do the drives use? IDE? EIDE? SATA?

i would agree with paint, if you have a multimeter check how many amps your drawing from each object and add 'em up to see if you within spec. (wait ... easier: check the voltages with every hooked up, if they're below spec or your psu won't start you're drawing too many amps. disconnect and then dial your operator. i mean get a bigger psu!) also try placing devices evenly across the cables coming out of your psu, although this might not do anything a few psu's have more than one rail for the +5v and most have separate rails for the +12 lines.

if the drives are SATA and your bios is up to date (<---ohh yeah that solves a lot of problems too!) then i can only think that its the psu,
which i found my old 350W back in the day couldn't handle 2 dvd burners and 2 hdd so it was one hdd or one burner but not all 4

if your drives are IDE then you could try playing around with jumpers as i've had some older rigs work only by completely ignoring jumper diagrams. btw i hate the IDE standard and now run everything off SATA

the psu is 650w..so its plenty...i use sata connections for all of the hard drives..asus p5e mobo

when you say it won't boot, could you elaborate? does the machine just sit and do nothing, or does it post and get to the point when it should start loading windows and then quit....?


a suggestion: with this i'm assuming that the sata connections are built onto the motherboard, and not on an expansion card.

you may need to go into your bios and set the raid chip (southbridge) to IDE mode (or whatever it's called in your bios, just not RAID). since you installed originally with only one HD connected, the bios likely defaulted to IDE-emulation mode. when you connect the second drive, it may be trying to assemble a non-existant raid array, fail, then stupidly just quit. setting the controller to IDE-emulation (or whatever it is in your bios) will make the system treat the HDs as independent physical disks.

just a guess.

hwsb wrote:you may need to go into your bios and set the raid chip (southbridge) to IDE mode (or whatever it's called in your bios, just not RAID). since you installed originally with only one HD connected, the bios likely defaulted to IDE-emulation mode. when you connect the second drive, it may be trying to assemble a non-existant raid array, fail, then stupidly just quit. setting the controller to IDE-emulation (or whatever it is in your bios) will make the system treat the HDs as independent physical disks.

just a guess.

Bowls makes a very good point here. I had to do the same with my machine when I built it - hence my question about the interface type, as I use SATA

This could be a number of issues......

1. Make sure you've loaded on the latest mobo drivers and have the latest version BIOS. (Do you know how to flash a BIOS?) The reason I say this is it my be a SATA cotroller issue.

2. Make sure the hard drive is plugged into the correct SATA slot (not the RAID slot).

3. If the hard drives have jumpers, make sure your C:\ with Vista is the primary and the other drives as slaves.

4. Make sure you didn't bend the pins for the cables. Very easy to do on SATA drives.

5. You say that your PSU is sufficent, it maybe........unless your running a high-end vid card (especially if there's 2 like ATI Crossfire or Nvidia SLI). Even one high-end card will sap most PSUs when your using multiple HDs.

I've said this before.........when posting comp issues, please list the specs and really be speciffic regarding the parts.

wow noob, vista?
Dont use vista
second set ur drives jumpers to cable select or csl
if that dont work then master slave
also on install u only need one drive install the others l8r
all drive should be formated first
did u say what type of drives sata or ata
is mb setup for raid config

mb is not set on raid, no pins bent, vista already loaded, not running sli (but am runnning high end video card). HDD's (all of them were detected when vista was first installed,but unplugged to simplfy. mobo drivers are up to date. hdd's are pplugged in sata ports. etc etc...i think its more of a mobo issue than anything...but thats just a guess..have my computer nerd sister comin over to check it this weekend....no matter the one hard drive that is workin is 500gig so i have plenty for now..thanks for all the advice