I have two hard drives, one for storage and the other for running my OS and various programs. I reinstalled XP yesterday and now my second hard drive cannot be detected. The other hard drive is not visible in disk management or in Bios. Under SATA-2 for Bios, it says "Drive ID = Unknown" and when booting up, for a split second, it the screen says "driver not found serial ATA." I have a crappy Sabrent SBT-RDIT RAID adapter to plug in my two drives. I'm presuming that controller card does not have its driver installed and so cannot read the second hard drive. Does that sound correct? I downloaded what driver I could find online here(http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=572566), but that running the one file in there doesn't work. Is there some special way I need to install the driver, if that is even the problem? Should I buy a new controller card for my hard drive? Any and all help is greatly appreciated. The only reason I know what little I do is because a friend helped me with this problem three years ago, but now he is long gone and I'm without tech savvy friends. additional info: I'm running a Dell dimension 4700 series.

Something is confusing. That controller card is an ATA card. You are stating you have a SATA hard drive connected to it. Are you sure you don't have the SATA drive connected to a SATA port on the motherboard? If the OS is installed to an IDE ATA hard drive then all you need to do is install the SATA drivers for your motherboard while in WinXP. Below is a link to the Dell site for all your drivers. I suggest you download all and burn to CDR. http://support.dell.com/support/dow... That link is for the 4700. For best results you should enter your service tag and get the EXACT drivers for your build.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I had downloaded most of the Dell drivers earlier using the service tag, but as suggested I finished downloading the rest. Unfortunately the drive is still not recognized. As for the driver controller card, I am not sure. From what I recall, the I had to buy the Sabrent SBT-RDIT adapter card years ago because my PC only had one hard drive port. I am not sure if I have both drives connected to that card, thought it would seem to make sense. But why one drive is functioning fine is beyond me. If you have any more suggestions please let me know or if you need more information I can look for it. I'm hoping this doesn't require opening my comp up considering everything was fine two days ago, I'm sure everything is plugged in proper.

Have you installed the service pack for XP? as SP1 is the minumum requirement to recognize SATA drives, latest is SP3.

I am currently running SP2, so that shouldn't be a problem.

You say you downloaded the rest of the drivers. Did you also install them? The storage controller is the one needed. Your motherboard evidently has SATA ports on it and the SECOND drive is connected there. The boot drive is evidently connected to the controller card and is working. Look in device manager to see if SATA controllers show up there.

I did install all the drivers I downloaded. I didn't see any marked as "storage controller" however. Under device manager I do not see a SATA controller. I do see SCSI and RAID Controller with Silicon Image SiI 0680 ATA-133 Medley Raid Controller. I updated that driver but ti says it cannot find a better match for my hardware.