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

[MadDavid]

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

 

[Jonathan_King]

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

 

[SIW2]

Hi David,

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

 

[MadDavid]

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.