Okay, so this evening I turned off my computer, opened up the case, unplugged my two storage hard drives onto which I'd backed everything up and re-installed windows (2000).

I've just finished installing all my baseline drivers & utilities and I'm raring to return to my normal computing - which, obviously, meant turning off my computer, reconnecting my storage hard drives, and firing it all back up to get at my music, my photos, my everything.

BUT

And this is quite a serious, serious but.

Windows won't recognise the two sata discs as they once were - all chock full of stuff - no, it tells me they're not formatted. And I want to cry.

I haven't a sata caddy to put them in to test them that way, and the only other computer in the house (this one) is so old it doesn't have sata inputs on the motherboard either.

What, if anything, can I do? How/why has windows failed to recognise what are essentially large storage volumes?

Could it have anything to do with the fact I've not installed SP4 yet (which frustratingly, sits on one of these unrecognised drives)?

O woe.

Woe.

Windows 2000 doesn't know what SATA is. XP is the same, trying to install Win XP on a machine with SATA always brought up the complaint that it couldn't find any hard drives. You need to install the SATA drivers, before it recognises the drives.

Have you installed the correct SATA drivers for the chipset?

If you have installed a SATA driver for the main drive (you haven't said whether it is SATA or PATA), it might be that the other drives are on a different controller, which uses a different chipset / driver...

Oh yes I remember getting caught with that one myself.

Well the good news is I found a copy of Acronis Director on one of my old DVD backups of my apps and that reads the drives as they were left, with all their files there - Windows still refuses to acknowledge their existence, but it's reassuring to know the data is still there.

As for the SATA/PATA thing - the storage drives are definately SATA, and to my recollection so is the system drive, but I'll need to confirm that when I'm home tonight. And yes, I had thought I'd done all my drivers, but there's always been a "Press f6 to install Nvidia raid drivers" prompt when building this computer (with an Asus A8N-SLi mobo) and I forewent that this time as I couldn't find the bastard floppy disk. Perhaps that's it?

Hmmmm. I'll guess I'll see in Round 2 tonight.

Missing floppy disk does sound like the culprit... have you checked device manager to see if there are any unknown devices, or yellow exclamation marks, etc?

Also might be worth downloading the sata drivers and making a new floppy...

At least if you can boot, you can install the chipset drivers.

The other alternative is to set the controller to "IDE mode" in the bios, although there will be a performance hit to this.

Wooohoo! Last night I creared the driver floppy disk (after 5 dead disks!) installed them (it was the Nvidia Storage Controller) "repaired" windows, and now both drives all back on line! Sweeet.

Who doesn't love a happy ending?!

Now, make sure you put the driver disk in a safe place, for next time!

or burn it to cd using the boot floppy emulation setting ...