help getting xp to recognized my sata drive

[Viva Las Espuelas]

ok. i did a fresh install of xp. it wouldn't recognize my SATA drive. it's a second internal drive. not the boot drive. anyway, i forgot what i did last time for it to be recognized, so i got frustrated and checked online what to do. i went to one board and some guy said go to the administrative tools and go to computer management and selected disk management. the drive showed up there, but wasn't letting me access it. i had the SATA drive split into 4 partitions and it had quite a bit of files. the guy on the board said to right click the drive and select mark partition as active. i'm assuming that this "partition" is the space from the 4 actual partitions that wasn't being used. after i did that it now says active by it, but nothing else. i go back to my computer and only that "partition" is showing up on my SATA drive. then i realize that the xp service packs will allow my SATA drive to be recognized. I intall that and still nothing. i fire up dataguard tools for my western digital SATA drive and try and make it recognize the SATA drive and it says the drive may contain a DDO. i'm assuming that's Dynamic Drive Overlay. how can i reverse this? i tried uninstalling the drive to reset it, but it's still popping up the same. i'm thinking i can delete this "partition" i made out of haste and correct my problem. i'm just thinking it will actually mess up the partitions that were already on the disk. make sense? any suggestions on how to correct it?

[baseline bum]

EDIT: shit, you already put on the service packs

[Cry Havoc]

Tough problem, because if Windows doesn't recognize the driver properly, it's going to be hard to transmit data. Lemme see if some of my friends know how to fix it. Provided you aren't in an extreme hurry, I can get back to you in a day or two, depending on how long it takes. Hardware is not my forte. :toast

[ChumpDumper]

Try downloading the disk software for that particular brand of drive and running it. MaxBlast for Maxtor, DiscWizard for Seagate, etc. They can often find those extra disks.

[PM5K]

I guess you could mark the partition as active, then copy the files to another drive, mark the next partition as active and repeat until you've copied all of the data off the drive, then format it and use one or two partitions, I can't see why you'd need four partitions unless you like to make things overly complicated.

Other than that I'm sure you can also fix the drive using disk management, I just don't know how off the top of my head.

[Viva Las Espuelas]

ok i should've made it clear that i don't want to reformat and lose my files unless i absolutely have to. here's the screenshot of what's going on.

Disk 1 is the one in question. for the "unallocated" section the only option i'm given is to format. i don't want to do that.
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/3383/disks.jpg

[PM5K]

Copy everything to N then format the unallocated space.

How big is the drive and what did you use to create the partitions?

[MavTalker]

Dude that is way to many drives for me, poor CPU is having to sort all your shit why not simplify things? Also maybe if you move the jumper settings to make the sata drive cable select it might help.
my 2 cents

[Viva Las Espuelas]

Copy everything to N then format the unallocated space.

How big is the drive and what did you use to create the partitions?

ok first of all Drive N=Disk 1. The SATA drive. I don't want to format it unless i absolutely must. Disk 0, my boot drive (IDE), has nothing wrong with it. The SATA drive, Disk 1, is 400Gb and I made the partitions using Western Digital's DataLifeguard Tools disk. My SATA drive is Western Digital.

[sabar]

Well I would say the problem is that it doesn't see a file system on it. What did you have it as? NTFS?

Do start-->run-->cmd-->chkdsk N:

Does it recognize the file system?

[sabar]

Dude that is way to many drives for me, poor CPU is having to sort all your shit why not simplify things? Also maybe if you move the jumper settings to make the sata drive cable select it might help.
my 2 cents

SATA drives dont have jumpers that are supposed to be changed, nor do they have a cable select jumper. All you can do is change the data transfer rate with one jumper which you should probably never need to do.

Each SATA drive has its own controller, there's no master/slave/cableSelect anything, just plug it in and determine boot order in bios.

[TDMVPDPOY]

maybe it aint gettin enough current power into the sata drive....

try updating the sata drivers....

i see you got 3 hard drives there....

remove one of them smaller capacity drives, and put everything program related onto one drive, while the sata has all the other shit backup onto it.....

[Viva Las Espuelas]

well the problem is solved. i just ran a data recovery program, broke down and bought a fairly inexpensive usb 2 drive and moved the files there. turns out when i did the dumbass move of making that little bit of drive Active it changed that section to FAT16. when i saw that i knew i had to get another drive so i could move the files to it. now i'll know from now on to install sp3 for it to recognize my 2nd internal.