Windows 2000 Not Recognizing Hard Drive?

[IntrigueDesign]

I have 2 hard drives in my system, partitioned a couple times. The main hard drive is a 30gb Maxtor, with Win2k installed on C. The second hard drive contains 2 partitions (D and H).

Since installed 2k Windows has not recognized the second hard drive as being formatted. The partitions exist through explorer, etc. But are oth labelled as "Local Disk" though that is not their correct volume names. Upon trying to format Windows cannot complete the operation, though dos (and 98 prior) have no problem reading the contents. All partitions are FAT 32 and work wonderfly outside 2k.

Please help! I'd prefer not to format by any means if possible...

 

[Floyd]

That is a very strange problem indeed. I had a similar issue with Win2k where it did not recognize a SCSI drive (not even in device manager) even though 98 and DOS read it just fine. A driver update somehow solved it...very unusual for something as basic as recognizing a hard drive.

However, yours is an IDE drive, and failing to recognize it is even more unusual. Definitely check to see if there are updated drivers for your IDE controller.

Also try running the usual diagnostic utilities, preferably Norton DiskDoctor because it can detect some of the more esoteric problems...otherwise just do a thorough run of Scandisk.

If that doesn't fix it, it would be worthwhile to boot to DOS and wipe the master boot record using fdisk /mbr. Just be careful that you're at the D:\ prompt when you do it...you don't want to clear the boot record of your C:\ drive. Win2k will assign a new GUID (globally unique identifier) in the registry and hopefully allow access to its contents in Explorer.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[Panther505]

Have you gone to the Disk Manager and inported the drive? Usually if you have a drive and have not imported the drive then you have access issues. Go admin tools- Computer management-Disk management and try to import the drive

 

[Theslowone]

Is your second hard drive running on udma 66 or 100?

If so you might have conflictions somewhere. Not sure.