Windows doesn't like my Barracuda...

[Charlie_B]

Hi Guys

I'm just setting up a new system which has two HDDs, a 300gig Seagate Barracuda 7200 (U-ATA) and a 36g Western Digital Raptor 10000 (SATA).
When i first tried installing windows it threw a fit and wouldn't recognise any partition i created on the Raptor, althought it was fine if i tried to install it on the Barracuda. I tried updating the drivers using F6 but nothing happened. Eventually, on the advise of a mate, i disconnected my Barracuda drive and for god knows what reason that made everythign alright.
However, when i tried to re-connect the Barracuda Windows threw another fit and now refuses to boot up. It boots up fine with just the Raptor connected. It will boot to Safe Mode with both connected, but it will not boot normally - I get a blue screen error message which vanishes before i have time to read it and the pc restarts.
There is no problem with my BIOS seeing both drives. When i was initially trying to install windows both drives were recognised fine. In Safe Mode it recognises both drives fine.

To further complicate things, this morning for the first (and only) time it actually worked properly and booted straight to Windows. At first it only recognised my Raptor and a second drive with 0 bytes, but after a couple of seconds the Barracuda was recognised as well. For some reason the drives are labelled C (the raptor), E (the main partition on my Barracuda) and F (my secondary Barracuda partition) so i went into Administrator Tools to change the lettering, but when i clicked 'Disk Management' the pc crashed and now refuses to boot again.

Obviosully, both drives have been formatted. I'm running an error scan on the Barracuda just in case, but i doubt anything will turn up.

Any suggestions?

[diehrd]

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS.

I would confirm the jumper settings are correct on each drive

[Charlie_B]

Cheers :)

I've had an issue with the jumper settings in that i bought the drives OEM so had to get the settings off the net, and when i looked i had no idea what the Seagate manual was on about. However, on another website i found info on a similar drive's settings and tried them, as well as other combinations. I think the slave setitng for the barracuda should be no jumper, but i've tried it on pins 5-6 (which i think is Master setting and it was on originally), 7-8, 1-2 and 3-4 to no avail.
As far as i'm aware the jumper settings on the Raptor have nothing to do with Master/Slave, and i've not changed it at all.

[Charlie_B]

Well, i've been tinkering around for most of the day and it seems it's fixed! :D

I changed a couple of things, and i'm not sure exactly which of them it was that solved the problem:

`When i installed my two optical drives i forgot to set one to slave. Just realised one wasn't showing up so i changed the jumper on it.
`I wiped the two partitions on my Baraccuda and formatted it again, with just one big partition.
`I set the jumper on the Barracuda to pins 3-4 again just to see what would happen
`I changed the boot order to put Removable last instead of first.

Which ever it was, everythign seems to work fine now When i got into Windows i received a message saying 'the system has recovered from a serious error', and now the drive is recognised fine and it seems to boot right every time... touch wood.

Cheers for the help