Hi
After adding a sata dvd writer, whic became the 3rd sata drive, the second ( Seagate barracuda 500gb)goes missing. It shows up in bios and 'device manager' , but not in 'disk management' or 'my computer. System: win. xp pro. home, gigabyte motherboard, amd dual core processors. The missing drive is partitioned: 'new voume': F, G, and H. I would appreciate your help.
Gerryx1.

Motherboard model number?

Hi Hughv, thanks for contact. My mobo. is: Gigabyte GA-K8NF - 9. nVidia nForce4-4xPCI K8 Socket 939. 4 Sata 1 ports. I tried switching the missing drive to dif. ports and changing cables, removing the Sony dvd writer, but no joy.
Gerryx1

Is there a RAID setup involved? What's the BIOS setting for these ports?
My board has 4 SATA ports, but doesn't support SATA Optical drives.
I can't tell from your manual whether yours does or not.

There is no Raid setup involved. I have limited experience of working in BIOS, what I have found, in the CMOS window is: NV Serial ATA 1 Enabled; SATA 1 class code: 0101; NV SATA 2 Enabled, SATA 2 class code: 0101. The Sony DRU-865S DVD writer seems to be working well. All RAID connections are Disabled.

Look in the BIOS under "Integrated Peripherals" and make sure the SATA secondaries are enabled.

Under 'Integrated Peripherals' I have noted the following: NV IDE/SATA RAID function Disabled = D
NV Serial ATA1 enabled = E , This is written in white, then, in lowlight with an X to the left of them is the following display: Serial - ATA 1 Primary RAID - D, Serial ATA 1 Secondary RAID - D. The same info is given for the Serial ATA 2 Primary and Secondary Raid ie. Disabled. As these are in lowlights you can't select them, uless maybe some other parameter is changed. I hope this is of some help. Thanks.

The manual just isn't clear about this.
Try connecting both HDs to:
The same channel.
Different channels.
How are they connected now?
It's possible you need a BIOS update.

I agree, the manual in most cases just states the obvious. I haven't tried shifting the connections yet, You've lost with: 'connecting the two HDs to same channel'. Is 'channel' another term for port, or something different. I just got the following from Gigabyte Support: "Test with the latest BIOS update. Use QcFlash Utility and set load optimized default in the main CMOS menu when completed". Setting the 'Load optimized Default', that is new to me, could you explain what is involved?

Your ports are shown in the manual as SATA 1 Primary, Secondary) and the same for SATA 2(P,S).
Again, the manual isn't clear, but I'd assume these ports are adjacent.
I should also mention that you may be able to set up a single disk RAID as I have on my board. It's usually called RAID 0 + 1.
Set one pair to RAID and use the RAID setup to designate it.
For "Optimized Defaults", open the BIOS, press F7. These are the fail safe defaults that reset any changes you may have made.