Drive disappears each time I reboot Windows machine

[radicool]

I have a Windows Server 2003 machine, which has a primary SATA Raid which works fine.

There is a secondary drive attached together with a CD-ROM to the IDE interface. Every time I reboot the machine, the secondary IDE drive disappears from Windows.

I need to go to Add Hardware and search for new hardware. The drive then magically appears in Windows Explorer again during the search, before I have even specified whether the hardware is attached.

The drive is always available in the BIOS, and the CD-ROM attached to the same IDE channel doesn't have any problems. Anybody seen this before or have any ideas??

 

[Peon]

Try changing the jumper configurations of the devices on the IDE chain so that the HDD is master and CDROM slave. Further than that, cheat and make a startup script that mounts the second HDD(no wait, thats unix). Basically fool Server2003 into searching that drive everytime the server is booting.

Also, I presume you using a server board. Search technical details on the board. Server boards and Desktop boards dont work exactly the same. So there might be a issue with a pre-existing RAID environment and normal storage environment. If you lucky might even be something small like a BIOS update.

Peon