How can I get my computer to work properly?

missed — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 04:04:29 -0800

How do I get Windows to see a drive, and fix some other wierd things? Recently I purchased a nice, fat 200 gig Maxtor IDE internal. I decided to use this drive as my primary OS drive, and got a Win XP Pro SP2 OEM disk (my original XP cd broke a while ago; note I also made sure all the updates were done after install). Let's look at my original setup...

C: drive, WD 80 gig, master
E: drive, WD 60 gig, slave
H: drive, external 80 gig HDD USB

Since I still wanted access to my original C drive, I slaved it to the Maxtor and then installed Win XP. The original E drive I put on the side for now. Windows, upon install, now had my system like this:

F: drive, Maxtor, master
C: drive, WD 80, slave
G: drive, external 80 gig HDD USB

Simple enough; I heard that Windows will arbitrarily assign drive letters so it's not a big deal to me as it's not really hard updating my shares so that my iBook can access files off the PC.

I wanted to now add the original E drive to my system, and so purchased an Ultra ATA IDE Controller PCI card, installed the drivers, slaved E, rebooted. Windows Explorer displayed the E drive in the Hard Disk Drives area, but when I attempted to access it an error message (can't access drive) was returned. A friend suggested that I try it in my IDE2 slot rather than the PCI slot to see if I could access the drive then. No problem being that I've been using an external DVD burner for my drive. And so I did so.

Now Windows isn't seeing the drive at all, but when I go to the Device Manager, it sees a drive there (no conflicts).

So I tried the following. I decided to return to the original set up (C, E...) and grab some files needed. Guess what? Same thing as above, where E is not seen in Windows Explorer, but there it is on the Device Manager.

Same results when I slaved the drive to the Maxtor drive, sans original C drive.

Did I kill my drive? Is there a way for me to access the files, either via IDE2, slaving it directly to the Maxtor, via the PCI controller card? Did I, in my lack of experience with more than otwo internal HDDs, overlook something?

Second problem/question.

After doing the install and updating the Win XP Pro SP2, I noticed that the SM Bus Controller was showing up with the dreaded yellow ! in the device manager. Never seen this before (the original C was fine in this regard), and am not really working the GoogleFu well on this matter. The mobo is an ABIT AN7 and I've an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ CPU. How can I resolve this problem; any other hardware information required to accurately work with me here?

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How can I get my computer to work properly?