I am using this motherboard just for a storage server. Code: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_Socket_A/A7N8X/#specifications I know its now that powerful. thats ok for now. I have 4 hard drives installed, 2 on each IDE Port. And i have an IDE Controller card with 2 IDE ports on it. I am using 1 port. I have 2 hard drives on that card. 1 works, the 2nd (Slave) shows as 0MB I know the drive works i installed it on a different port. then tried another IDE drive. it shows 0MB but works on another port, and in a different pc. anyone have any suggestions why it shows 0mb. when windows boots up, it dont even show up in the management console either. Thanks
There are a couple different reasons you could be having problems. Number one the A7N8X is about a decade old now. I have a feeling you are simply maxing out the number of HDDs your board will handle, controller card or not. You could also be using a vastly outdated version of Windows. If you are using XP you need at least SP2 for proper HDD functionality especially with large amounts of drives or large storage sizes. The Controller card or even the individual port could be bad as well. Considering the relative age of the rest of the system, I would imagine the controller card is fairly old. If all else fails you can try replacing the controller card and see if that makes a difference. Before you try anything though, be extra sure to check ALL of your jumpers for EVERY drive and make sure the cables are plugged in correctly as well. Master/Slave plugs on PATA/IDE cables ARE different internally and do make a difference. BTW the Management console is really weak and doesn't actually read your drives at a hardware level. Try MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition. It's much more powerful than the disk management console and has often detected drives that Windows simply couldn't find. It could be a problem with drive letters. It may have been assigned a letter already used by a drive in your system. Partition Wizard will let you know for sure, if that's the case. Again, I'm surprised that board works at all. Can you tell me the rest of your system specs please? Curious to know.
ok. so ya know the board. its got 2 gigs of ram at 400mhz. antec 430w power supply. My old Nvidia fx5500 graphics card. 1.1ghz athlon CPU. I tried keeping 1 drive on the controler card port 1, and another drive on the port 2 of the controller card, weird, it read 80gigs same as the first, but the second was a 40 gig, and then when it went to windows, nether drive would show up, only when i disconnected the 2nd drive on the controller card, the first one showed back up in windows. so i can have a total of 5 drives right now. 2 160gigs, 2 80 gigs, and 1 40 gig. I will build another one down the road, all sata. I can find a board that can handle enough drives.
There's also the possibility that the drive is bad and sending issues back through the system, weirder things have happened. Does it only happen with the 40GB drive? I think the issue is with the controller card itself. It might be failing, or not compatible with one of the drives. Also try switching out the cables because one of them could be bad. Again, jumpers are important as well so make sure those are right or nothing will work.
Jumpers are all good, except on the controller card, have to be on Cable Select, Master, they wont even show up. as for the IDE cable, im using a standard one, but the controller card, has all the pins, so i had to drill out a hole in the ide cable, all the drives are reconized on it. ( first port on the master IDE slot) but any drive on the second port reads 0mb. i wonder if the power supply just doesnt have enough juice. it is only a 430 watt. all hard drives 3 fans total, 1 graphics card, network ( integrated ) and the controller card. The hard drive is good. i used it on another pc, and did a hard drive health test, it came back as "Good". no ticking at all on any of them. i guess 5 is good for now. the 2 160 gigs are almost full, with all my backed up movies, the other ones have my software, and music, pictures. I am in the process of going to build a brand new media center pc. thats gonna act as a meda center, and storage server, and gonna sit on a linux OS. also that can be accessed from outside the local network. So i can stream to my phone and laptop at work or where ever ( i Have wifi ) an run my website. so gonna need to setup a couple firewalls for all that. But for now this is ok. just getting full. time to leave IDE and move on to sata. also designing one media pc. for in my car. gonna use sold state drives.
