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Computer Cannot See 2 Hard Drives

N

nasttcar

Senior member
Kinda of a long story here. So here goes.

I have a Dell P4 3.2 with 2gb RAM running XP Pro with all updates. I need more hard drive memory in addition to my c:\ of 40 gb and my d:\ of 200. I first add an external 500 gb WD drive running off a firewire port. All works well. A week later I add a 300 gb Maxtor hard drive. Since the 200 gb was a parallel ATA drive I bought a 2nd 300 gb parallel ATA drive and attached it to the PCI board that the original 200 gb runs off of. As part of the 300 gb drive install I needed to remove PCI boads and move things around for access.

I restart the computer and the 1st thing I notice is that the computer sees the 2 big hard drives, but beeps and says for me to do F1 to continue or F2 for setup. I do the setup, and esc but each time on reboot I get the same question. Additionally, the 500 gb drive is no longer recognizable.

I go back into the computer, move boards around again, make sure all are seated and now more problems.

On boot up, the screens that roll through, see my 2 big drives however when xp finally finishes the startup windows explorer does not see the 2 big drives. Also, a wireless mouse does not work and the 500 gb drive is not seen.

I have removed boards and rebooted and added a single PCI board back one at a time, but get the same result.

I would rather not, but will if I have to reload XP, but I do not want to lose all my pictures and songs on the hard drives. I am pretty sure I have most all backed up on the 500 gb external drive.

I am just absolutely baffled at what has happened.

Please Help

 
Additional Info. System Mgr shows the WDC and Maxtor, 200 & 300 GB drives, but Windows Explorer only shows the 40 gb and some other drive named E:\ that wants me to format it.
 
Chances are, your drive letters switched, and the boot.ini file is still pointing to drive c:, try re-assigning drive letters, or edit the boot.ini

Explorer probably is not recognizing the new drive if it is still raw. Format it, and it should appear.
 
Thanks,

The new 300 gb drive was formatted and has been used and had files added to it. The 200 gb drive is a couple years old.

Computer has run just fine up until lately. I keep firewall and antivirus and spyware up to date and have no odd emails or been to any strange websites.

How do I edit the boot.ini ?

thanks
 
I replaced both ide cables from the pci board to the hard drives and swapped the drives connections on the pci board. Still the drives do not show in disk management or explorer.

There is a strange drive shown as E:\ that is 128mb, which does not correspond to the missing drives.

If the PCI board is bad, how would the boot up sequence see the 2 missing drives and how would device manager see the drives. If I remove the PCI board, then the drives are not shown in the boot up sequence. Consequently I would think the PCI board is OK????????

I tried to reinstally xp pro but I got a message that my copy of windows on the m/c was newer than on my disk.

I am really baffled.
 
Problem solved. Had a bad PCI Ide ATA drive controller board.

Installed a new board and both drives are found.

Now adding boards one by one back into the computer.
 
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