I’ve done some searches on here – you guys seem to have the most helpful forum for non-tech’s like myself so please excuse my ignorance on some terms, I’ll try to explain my problem as clear as possible.
My old pc was running xp on the following config:
Chip: Athlon AMD XP 2200+ (1800 MHz) Socket A
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-7VA
Video: Radeon 9200 Pro AGP series
Ram: 1 x 1Gb + 1 x 512Mb
Pioneer DVD burner
4 x hard drives (1 x 120Gb loaded with XP, 1 x 200Gb storage, 2 x 320 Gb storage) 1st two drives on mainboard IDE slots, 2nd two drives on IDE expansion card.
As you can see it was getting a bit old so I decided to upgrade some hardware and thought that Vista Home Premium would also be a good move. The computer co. was going to take 6 days to build a new one (in hindsight I should have just let them do it) but thinking it might be time to learn a bit more about computers I would have a crack at it myself. All has gone (reasonably) well. The new config is as follows:
Chip: AMd Athlon 64 x2 dual core 4600+
MBoard: Asus M2N4-SLI
Video: NVidea GEForce 7600GT
Ram: 2 x 1Gb
I tossed my old 120Gb HD with XP and bought a new 320Gb WD Sata and loaded Vista on it successfully as the c: drive.
I’ve now added the old storage hard drives too – on the Primary IDE MB slot is the old WD 200Gb IDE HD with jumpers set to master, the Secondary IDE slot on the MB is the DVD burner set to slave (it has always been jumpered to slave and worked fine before so I haven’t touched it), and I added the IDE expansion card to the PCI2 slot (it has the 2 x 320Gb Wd HD’s on one ribbon). The PCI1 slot has the wireless card and the PCIEX161 slot has the graphics card.
The BIOS seems fine and it seems Vista has recognised that the IDE drives are present but they are not showing in the ‘My Computer’ window. In the Disk Management it is showing Disk0 is dynamic with an offline status, Disk1 is basic and is the c:drive with Vista loaded (all ok on that one), Disk 2 and 3 are also dynamic with an offline status. There is no right-click option to bring the offline’s back to online, the only option is to convert them to basic (there is data on them so I don’t know if it will wipe them and even if that will solve the problem anyway). They are all MBR styles. The offline Disks are all showing zero capacity and zero unallocated space.
I think I was too cocky in believing we could build this whole thing with pretty much zero experience, so now with my tail between my legs I figured I’d ask for some help if anyone can offer it?
cheers,
Brian
Western Australia