Installing XP on SCSI drive...help!

[FastRedPonyCar]

OK some guy brought a dell precision 360 desktop into our shop and it has a SCSI hdd adaptor and 2 western digital IDE drives, each in an SCSI cradle that plugs into the SCSI to IDE adaptor.

I was fairly sure I'd need to do the whole F6 to load SCSI drivers before XP install begins but before the machine even POSTS, it comes up saying no primary HDD found. Bios says "unknown device" as primary IDE drive.

The actual harddrive is perfectly fine as I took the drive out of it's little SCSI adaptor module and just plugged it straight up to the mobo with an IDE cable. It's loading XP right now.

The problem is, there's a 2nd hdd in it's scsi tray that he wants XP on as well so that he can do the whole hot swap thing with the drives.

I don't have another SCSI to IDE adaptor around to try and see if the actual adaptor that these hdd modules are sliding into is bad or if there's just something I'm not doing to allow the PC to SEE that adaptor.

Can anyone shed some light on what could be wrong here?

BTW, I hit up dell's site and downloaded the scsi drivers, put them on a floppy , loaded them with F6 before the xp install but it comes back saying no hdd found to install the OS to.

[Galileo Figaro]

Not too clear what you try to accomplish here?

If there's an installed XP system on the machine, then the IDE-to-SCSI drive should be seen in the drive manager, even if it doesn't appear on the desktop. In the drive manager it can be formatted. Alternatively one could use Puppy Linux or Partition Magic and instead prepare the drive from there.

Note that an IDE drive formatted on an IDE interface and then moved to a SCSI converter, to act as a faux SCSI drive, most likely won't be considered formatted under the SCSI regime. And vice versa.

Is there a point of going the complicated route via IDE-to-SCSI conversion if the machine already has native ATA or IDE support? A good general advice in this case might be to strive to adhere to the motto: "Keep it Simple, Stupid".