Windows 7 doesn't give letters to two of my harddrives


  1. Posts : 2
    Windows 7 / Windows XP x64
       #1

    Windows 7 doesn't give letters to two of my harddrives


    I have a computer with an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, with 4 SATA II ports and 4 Silicon Image SATA_RAID ports. I am having trouble getting Windows 7 to acknowledge a pair of Seagate 80 GB ST380815AS ATA drives.

    I recently bought Windows 7, and thought that as long as I was performing a complete install, I'd upgrade my computer by putting the new OS on an SSD and getting a pair of drives to run in RAID 0 for gaming.

    First I installed the SSD and put Win 7 on it. Everything went fine. Then I put in the two new Seagate 80 GB drives and linked them as a RAID 0 drive. Everything went fine except for the minor detail that Win 7 claimed that it had no driver for the RAID Device.

    While I was kicking around trying to find a solution, Win 7 updated itself a couple of times and downloaded a "Silicon Image RAID Light" update. When the computer rebooted, it stopped complaining about not having a driver for the RAID, but it didn't show me a drive letter for the RAID drive, either.

    I decided that getting Win 7 to use the RAID on my ancient motherboard just wasn't meant to be, so I unplugged the drives from the RAID slots and plugged all 4 drives into the primary SATA II Ports.

    Now, I can see drive letters for my SSD and my old Win XP drive, but I don't have drive letters for the two Seagates. When I look in the device manager, the drives are there under "Disk drives," and it says "this device is working properly." When I go to the "Volumes" and click "Populate," it says
    Disk: Disk 2
    Type: Unknown
    Status: Not initialized
    Partition Style: Not Applicable
    Capacity: 76319 MB
    Unallocated space: 0 MB
    Reserved space: 0 MB

    I've also noticed that it does not give drive letters to the parts of my Maxtor Media Reader (as Win XP did), but I assumed that this was because they didn't have media cards in them.

    How can I get the two Seagate drives working? (Preferrably in RAID mode.)

    Thanks for any help
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 13,354
    Windows 7 Professional x64
       #2

    Welcome, David!

    Have you tried assigning a drive letter for them in Device Manager? Right-click on them and select the option.

    Hope this helps,
    ~Jonathan
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 16,132
    7 X64
       #3

    Hi David,

    In Disk Management, RT click on the HD - on the left where it says the word DISK - select intialize - select mbr.
      My Computers


  4. Posts : 2
    Windows 7 / Windows XP x64
    Thread Starter
       #4

    Thanks for the tips.
    For anyone reading, I connected the drives to the Silicon Logic SATA_RAID ports, made sure that the drives were assigned to a RAID 0 drive by the motherboard and went into Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Drive Manager to declare the unlettered "Drive 2" as a MBR drive. After a bit of futzing around, I discovered that I had to then delcare a simple volume on the drive. (Also done from Drive Manager)

    Interestingly enough, it looks like you can declare a striped volume on any two or more drives that have undeclared space available.
      My Computer


 

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