Help with raid 0 and a 3rd ata HD

[Superpickles]

Hiya, new to these forums, read them quite a bit but never posted before.

My problem is that I can't install a 3rd hard drive as a back up to my raid 0 sata setup. I have 2 seagate sata 80 gig 8mg buffer hard drives (raid 0) and I want to set up a 3rd 80 gig ata seagate as a data back up.

If I hook up the hard drive to the ata cable the system does not even see it in the bios or when windows xp pro loads. I have tried to set it up as master/slave on ide 1 and 2. I'm kinda lost here as I can't find any info as to if I need to do something special in the bios as I really can't see anything.

System specs
Asus A7N8X2.0 Deluxe Bios 1006
Athlon 2600xp
Windows xp pro
2 - seagate 80 gig raid 0 sata hard drives

New hard drive Im trying to install is
seagate 80 gig ata ide 2meg buffer

1st ide controller used for cd rom/cd rom burner
2nd ide unused

Thanks in advance to any info someone comes up with.

I'm not sure you can actually do what you're attempting. At least not without a seperate controller card. Though I have the same board and it's nice to know before hand that I'll need a controller for my data drive...

There's probably some software you can get that will do automatic back-ups, but I don't think it'd do it on the fly. Been wrong before though.

BTW, welcome to TIMO.

[Superpickles]

What I mean is I want it to behave as a 2nd hard drive. Not to actually backup my raid 0 setup. Sorta like if I just had 2 ide hard drives in my system but I use the raid 0 setup as windows/programs etc and I want the new hard drive for placing extra data/music etc.

Well, you could either put it on your secondary IDE channel with your CD-ROM, or you could buy a PCI controller card. I'd go with the controller card if you can swing it. That way it won't be slowed down by your CD-ROM.

[Superpickles]

I almost never use the cd rom and I really don't care if it's slow or not, as long as it can hold data. I'll try that right now and see if the system recognizes the hd on slave to the cd burner.

My problem is all about windows seeing that the hard drive is there. I wasn't sure if the raid drivers are somehow telling windows to ignore any other hard drives that arn't sata.

It shouldn't. I think the board will either only see the SATA controller, or the primary IDE controller, not both is all.

[Superpickles]

Bios and windows does now see the hard drive. Only problem is it doesn't come up under My Computer and I cannot access it.

It shows in device manager as enabled and working properly, and as the slave to the cd burner in the bios.

Now to be able to access it....any other suggestions?

[John Prophet]

I think you have to give it a partition before it will show up in my comp etc

would that be under "disk management"?

[Superpickles]

Thx, disk manager did the trick.