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Thread ID: 32881 2003-04-30 12:11:00 PCI IDE Controller Cards and Windows XP dashby (3702) Press F1
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140366 2003-04-30 12:11:00 I have been using a PCI IDE controller card in my PC (ASUS A7V333 MB, AMD 1.8+GHz Processor) for a year or so and have had two 120GB Seagate drives attached to one channel, formatted with FAT32. And I was running Windows XP.
Then I upgraded to SP1 and my controller card was reinstalled as a RAID/SCSI device and my hard drives turned up as SCSI Disk devices. Windows XP would not recognise that they were formatted with FAT32. Disaster! It actually wanted to format them with the NTFS file system, this would be OK but I would lose existing files and would not be able to access them when booting into Linux.
Well I booted into my machine with Win98 and had no problems seeing all my hard drives so I knew it must be the way the contoller acrd was installed in Windows XP but after much searching of the net I have yet to find a solution.
The cards I have tried so far are Highpoint HPT370 and a Silicon Image SiI 680 ATA 133 Controller. As far as I was aware the Silicon Image controller did not have RAID capabilities so am puzzled why it should be installed as a RAID/SCSI device.
Any help would be appreciated
dashby (3702)
140367 2003-05-01 09:31:00 You dont haveta format in order to use NTFS. Just open the command prompt and type convert /? that'll bring up a template. It can convert to NTFS w/o losing a thing. It'll ask u to reboot once it finishes converting

Try deleting those devices in device manager, reboot and see what it picks them up as. XP should re-detect them once u reboot. BUT yer as u said Linux may not read it if u do convert to NTFS
Spacemannz (808)
140368 2003-05-01 10:07:00 Could try going into device manager and on the card choose properties and under the General TAB there is a Roll Back Driver option. Pheonix (280)
140369 2003-05-04 07:05:00 Sorry I havn't replied to your answers.
I have tried a few things since I posted including removing the drives from device manager and re-booting and removing the IDE controller card and re-installing. In every case Win XP sees the drives as "SCSI Disk Device"
The driver that it uses for the disk drives is the same as for the IDE drives connected to the mother board controller.
I would really like to be able to see them as normal IDE drives in FAT32 format.
I did convert one spare drive to NTFS to see what would happen and it worked fine but when I converted back to FAT32 WINXP failed to see that it was already formatted.
The problem seems to be that WinXP expects a SCSI Device to be NTFS only or maybe it does not expect RAID controllers to use IDE drives.
dashby (3702)
140370 2003-05-10 06:29:00 Yup. Once a hdd is in NTFS XP cant convert back to FAT32. You have to use a 3rd party program like PartitionMagic, if you want to convert the NTFS partition back to FAT32 Spacemannz (808)
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