fit more than 2 HDDs on PC

[e-z-e]

ive seen this done before, but how exactly do i do it?

[gmatov]

e-z-e,
Is this a serious ?? No replies make me curious.
Just buy an ATA 66-100-133 card for a PCI slot and add up to 4 more drives, any combination, CDR, DVD, DVDR, anything IDE. If you have 2 spare slots, 2 cards. Just make sure your power supply is lare enough.
George

[jeex]

2 harddrives on a computer is simple.

4 harddrives & 2 media drives is too, but you need a controller card.

i'm having a bit of a pain in the ass with mine right now, anytime i try to boot in to windows with a harddrive attatched to it i get "ntdlr is missing".

[jeex]

hm. i got it to work. the card doesnt detect any drives in its bios screen, but windows see's them just fine.. never had this happen before.. weird.. but ahwell

[Craig Tucker]

I have 5 hard drives, a CD burner a DVD burner and a zip drive

My motherboard has 2 IDE connectors and 2 Raid connectors which allows 8 devices to be connected. This is common for newer motherboards. If you just have 2 ide connectors this allows only 4 devices to be connected, but as mentioned you can easily add a PCI IDE controller card to add more IDE devices.

[e-z-e]

hehe thanks guys...ended up doing a little googlegear search and found that the controller card i needed was just laying on my friends kitchen table...(my best source for my parts) so now im running 13 gb, 20 gb, and 60 gb.

[gmatov]

And naturally, the drives will not be found under the BIOS on autodetect, because they're not being controlled by the onboard IDE controller. They're controlled by the add-on controller card, so BIOS ignores them. Depending on the machine, you may see a page of the boot screen that says "detecting---" which will list the drives, and then again, as on my one main machine, not. I can't even recall if I installed the Promise driver on this machine, but the drives function. I know it's installed on the #2 machine, and it always tells me "no drives installed". Well, duh!!! I knew that. It's just waiting for the next drive to be bought. Next week, mebbe? By the way, do you note the order is not the same?

[gmatov]

Jeex,
Are you dual booting with NT or Win2k or even XP? Are you missing "ntdlr" or "ntldr"? Did you install a new drive or re-install Win98 or something? If you re-install 98 as the primary OS after installing Win2k, it overwrites the instructions that allow the dual boot, rather the Win2k boot at all. You'll have to re-install the NT type OS again.

[e-z-e]

guys,

i think my 13.5 gb just crashed... what else could loud, fairly constant clicking noises mean? !!!!!

is there a way to fix this?

e-z-e

[jeex]

Jeex,
Are you dual booting with NT or Win2k or even XP? Are you missing "ntdlr" or "ntldr"? Did you install a new drive or re-install Win98 or something? If you re-install 98 as the primary OS after installing Win2k, it overwrites the instructions that allow the dual boot, rather the Win2k boot at all. You'll have to re-install the NT type OS again.

nope, not dual booting at all.. i've been having this problem forevers it seems.. if the drives stay connected and i get them to work togethere, everything is fine.. but if i try removing a drive, or adding a drive if even only for a minute to my controller card (while the computer is off of course), then all hell breaks loose.. i start getting ntdlr errors, and then about an hour later it all works fine.. its happened to me about a dozen times..

i'm not sure why this happens.. but when i get my next mobo/cpu, i'm going to backup everything on dvd-rw's on my current computer.. format all of these harddrives and then do a fresh install of xp on my new system..

i dunno if its something conflicting in the mbr's of the drives, but it ******* pisses me off.

[p.s.- none of my drives connected to the controller card are detected in my PC bios(of course), or my controller card BIOS(weird), but windows xp see's them(even weirder), and they work just fine(astonishing)]

[gmatov]

Jeex,
I've checked my MCSE disk, and the MS site, and the only thing there is NTldr, NT loader, I assume, which is a boot disk element, for whatever that's worth. I am not an MCSE.
Are you putting these disks in and out randomly? Every time you install another, in another position, it is assigned another drive letter. If yuou should happen to run a disk utility, it finds a whole bunch of errors, shortcut pointing to the wrong drive, etc. If you repair them, then remove or replace that or another drive, the shortcuts, etc, are re-assigned, and Norton, or whatever you have want to do another repair. I have completely lost drive contents doing this, unrecoverable, reformat, re-install,because, I think, the damn fixer upper loses its little mind. When you do this, XP probably eventually repairs the Master Boot Record and lets you get on with life. You probably should add the temporary drive to the end of the chain every time. That sounds like such good advice that I'm gonna write it on my hand so that I follow it, too.
George