Initio SATA Raid PCI Card

[montanavistauser]

Hello all. New to this board and need some help. Have a computer running Windows XP - 512 MB Ram, 20GB hard drive.

Tried to install a 2nd hard drive that's 160GB and has data on it that I need.

Here's the issue. The 2nd HDD is a SATA drive and I don't have an SATA plug on my motherboard (it's an AOPEN MX46 motherboard). I bought a CP Technologies PCI Card Serial ATA

I plugged the PCI card in and started the computer, it installed the device driver off of the included CD and then I installed the SATA RAID Manager as the instructions stated. The problem that I have is that I can't read the hard drive under My Computer. I can't create a new array in the program because it wants to format any drive that I try to connect in the array - but I have valuable data that I need. Without purchasing an external card slot (and just hooking it up via USB) is there any way that I can make this computer see the 160GB drive without formatting it? The 160GB drive has Windows Vista 32-bit(?)

THANK YOU!!!

 

[Nelviticus]

You could try this:
- Connect the drive to the card
- Answer 'no' when it asks you to format it
- Right-click My Computer and select 'Manage'
- Go to 'Disk Management'
- Find your drive, right-click it and select 'Add Partition'.

I think the last step is correct; I can't test it because I don't have a blank disk. Whatever the option's called it's for making existing partitions show up rather than for creating new partitions.

If that doesn't work I'd try either attaching the drive to a PC that DOES have SATA ports and copying the data somehow, or buying a normal SATA card rather than a SATA RAID card.

Regards

Nelviticus