Nathan10, To start with you should have 2 IDE connections on the motherboard – 1 labeled “primary” and 1 labeled “secondary”, connect the drive you want to use as a boot drive as “Master” on the primary ide connection and another drive as “slave”. to add the other 2 drives, set 1 as “master” and the other 1 as “slave”. you should now be able to boot and see all 4 drives in the bios… to be able to use the other drives in windows, dosent matter which version, they need to be partitioned and formatted. You can use Partition Magic or any other 3rd party partitioning sw to do this, or if using XP or Server 2k3 it can be don from the admin tools. If installing XP or S2k3, I recomend using NTFS as file system.
Hope this helps…
Later Rod

Drives – Ide0(zero) Master is the bootable and slave is also ran. Ide1 Master is usually the CD/DVD and slave another also ran. These are physical definitions. Subject to some BIOS finagling. But the norm for server or workstation.
Windows however has some gotchas. 1 – Installing will only see the ‘bootable’ drive. 2 – after install may only see the slave drives if formtted and assigned drive letters (Computer management -> Drive management (logical drives).
3 – Mixing drive types on a systme before installing Windows can result in strange assignments of drive letters and drives that ‘disappear’ after restart. Best practice is to setup Windows, THEN add extra drives one at a time.

Good luck.

I find myself wondering why you are installing IDE drives in a server. I would think that you would be much better served (no pun intended) by SCSI drives. If you are installing four IDE drives then one might assume that you have a SCSI controller for your CD drive and maybe a tape drive. If it is there, why not use it.

Just a thought
Paul

First – you say the computer booted and sees one drive? Did it have Windows on it already? Does ‘not seeing it’ mean there are no D: E: F: drives? Even if all else was right, you still need to create logical partitions and format them before you’ll see them. An install of Windows won’t format the other physical drives. Go to ‘Disk Manangement’ where a GUI can be used to create the partitions, format them and assign drive letters they way you want them. Note: if you want them consecutive, you’ll probably need to temporarily assign the CD a high letter and then assign the drives.

-Paul

Further to what Paul just said, if SCSI is out of the picture (for whatever reason, and I would also seriously consider it for a server class system), what about SATA? You’ll probably get increased reliability (especially from Western Digital or Seagate HDD’s) and WILL get better throughput with SATA or SATA 2 drives than with IDE/ATA drives.

A good Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 controller and a set of 146GB hard drives (four, in your case) can be had for well under $1500.00, a relatively small amount when configuring a server. If SATA is your choice, a 4 port SATA controller and four 159=0GB HDD’s can be had for a bit less…

First : ide = 1 master 1 slave per cable
second : why use stanard ide on server.
third : in xp – r click my comp – manage – disk management >>>
>> your unconf hdd will show as black – r click – create partition and format….. thats it your done…..

Hi,

After your configuration problems SCSI would be a better design. Also think of RAID in the future just to add to your reliability ( but watch costs- IT dept’s are always nagged about budgets)

Regards

Newton