PCI SATA Card

My motherboard has two SATA ports both of which feed HDDs. I needed
additional capacity and as I intend at some stage to 'upgrade' I bought
(ebay) a new SATA drive (320GB Seagate formatted NTFS)) and a PCI SATA Card
(Via chipset) to give me additional SATA ports. The PCI SATA Card came
with the requisite drivers (at least I think so!) but no 'how to guide'.

I installed the HDD and card and loaded the card drivers. At the POST the
'new' HDD did not show but it did show after WINXP started in Disk
Management as Drive 2 with a letter designator (L). The disk was shown as
formatted NTFS as a primary drive. As the HDD is 320GB I wished to
partition it and it is at this point I ran into a problem as I couldn't
access the disk to delete the existing partition to allow me to repartition.

I tried various 'partitioning software' including the WINXP install disk
none of which could see the new drive as clearly the necessary drivers for
the PCI Card were not being accessed. To cut the story short, I
disconnected HDD drive 1 and connected the new HDD in its place. This then
allowed me to access the new drive through Disk Management to delete the
existing primary partition and create the required extended and logical
partitions. I then reconnected all HDDs and everything is now working OK.

As an aside, during this 'episode' I started to get the message 'Disk D:
needs checking for consistency' at boot up. Why, I have no idea, but
running 'fsutil dirty query D:' gave 'dirty' which 'chkdsk d: /f/x' seems to
have fixed.

Other than hoping my experience may help someone, can anyone tell me if
there is another/better method to repartition a SATA drive connected to a
PCI SATA Card.


.

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