HELP!!!! Please....

[GaryC17]

Hi everyone, I got a problem at hand with my PC. I just bought a Silicon Image SiI 680 IDE Controller Raid Card. My intention was to hook up a new Harddisk of 200GB to my computer. I asked the retailer and he told me I needed this RAID card for I am running on a Pentium 3 933Mhz Processor with 256 MB Ram on a Asustek P3V4X motherboard. So I bought this card, came home, installed it and the drivers. After all of that, I still do not see my new 200GB MAxtor Diamond Max 10 Harddisk under Windows Explorer. Can anyone tell me what did I do wrong here? I am really at wits end.

 

[GavinO]

Before you can see a disk in Explorer, it needs to be partitioned. Under Windows 95, 98, and Me you use fdisk (this is the easiest method to mess up). With Windows 2000, you can use the simpler drive manager (found under administrator tools). I've never managed partitions under XP, but there is this knowledge base article: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

If you're on one of the systems that requires the use of fdisk, it's important to be careful to not alter the existing drives (fdisk's usual behavior comes from the days of single fixed disks in a system).

As a note, if you need a controller for a single drive, a RAID controller is overkill. If you don't have space on your on-board IDE controllers, a simple IDE controller card will work. The capabilities of the RAID card are geared to map multiple physical drives together as a single drive.