Hi there, I currently have the following IDE connections: Primary Master: Maxtor 80GB HDD Primary Slave: DVD Burner Secondary Master: DVD Drive Secondary Slave: Seagate 180GB HDD I want to add a further IDE HDD and have bought a RAID Card to achieve this. (The Device Manager shows this card as: Silicon Image Sil 0680 Ultra-133 Medley ATA RAID) and reports that the device is working correctly and has no conflicts. The problem is that I can't get the contents of my new HDD to be displayed or recognised (i.e. NO Drive Letter assigned). During Boot-Up I am prompted to press 'F3' to enter RAID Setup, however pressing 'F3' doesn't actually do anything! The New HDD is set as Primary master on the RAID Card, or am I missing something here? Do I have all the components needed to add further IDE devices to my computer or does the RAID Card require something else? Any help would be gratefully received. I will continually monitor this post and provide any further information if needed. Thanks for your help John

Everything is fine, you are missing one vital step tou need to give the disk a partition so it can be identified. If you have a boot disk use it to fdisk the new drive. Then you should be able to see it in windows and format it accordingly. If you have partition amgic 7 or 8 load it and it will the drive and allow you to partition it and format it. Unfortunately windows isn't smart enough to see the drive unless some sort of a partition is created. Regards Soldano Work Is The Rent We Pay For The Space We Occupy On Earth AMD Athlon XP2500 Codegen 550W P/S Gigabyte GA-8KNXP 1 Gig ECC-DDRAM 2x200gig SATA Seagate HDD Pioneer A06 DVD Burner

Thanks Soldano, The new HDD is infact an old HDD from my work computer. It is formatted with two partitions and has Win 98 installed. However I cannot get my present computer to recognise that it's there! Can you help further? Regards Thanks for your help John

Make sure your raid drivers are xp compatible ie digitally signed by microsoft. Also recheck your jumpering on the hd sometimes cs (cable select) works better with some raid cards. Also maybe your cable to the hd is faulty - not plugged in properly. Check power to hd. Did you or someone drop the hd? But I also agree with soldano that it could be for what ever reason windows cannot see the partion.It may be corrupt and have to be partitioned again. If so you will lose all data on the hd unless you use a recovery program or partition magic.

There is no mention of seeing the drive on the raid card at bootup. You need to get into the raid card bios. In the bios you can set the drive up and even format it. Until you can confirm at the hardware level you have connectivity the rest is a waste of time.

Yes Wanderer is right if you do not see a disk array defined at boot up you will need to set one up. You should see a splash screen for your raid card on bootup follow the instructions to set up an array.

Thanks to you all, I found that the problem was as Lyle said in-so-far-as the IDE cable was damaged (it is a brand new cable!!) I've replaced it will an old one and the HDD is now recognised. Once again thank you for all the help provided. Regards Thanks for your help John