XP not seeing hard drive

[tuki99]

On a Win XP system, I added a second (slave) hard drive formerly installed in a system running Win 98 SE. Since it was a slave on the other system, I didn't have to change any jumpers on the second HDD.

The BIOS sees and identifies the new drive, Device Manager sees and identifies the hard drive, but the drive isn't listed in My Computer, and I can't access any of the files. There is a partitioning app I ran across in Win XP, that sees the drive, and that there is 8% empty space, so I know there is (or was) good data there.

Any ideas why this might be? If it's not a bad hard dirve, any suggestions what to do to get the OS to list the HDD in my computer? I am totally clueless about WinXP and the differences between it and WIn 98.

This is not a home built machine...could the vendor have done something to prevent anyone adding components to their system?

I'm baffled.....

 

[edblor]

Goto Control Panel, under Administrative Tools, then goto Computer Management. In there is a heading for Storage. Right under that is Disk Management. You should see the HDD in there, at this point, you can right click and create a new partition, or format the partition any way you see fit!

G/L,

Edblor

 

[boomerang]

You can't access the drive because there is an OS on it. Your BIOS looks to your XP drive (C, I assume) and boots from that drive. XP sees the additional drive as bootable and won't let you access it to protect your system.

The answer I believe, is to wipe the boot sector on your second drive.

This is beyond the scope of my knowledge and I will not give advice I am unsure about. I would do some more research on this before taking my word as the gospel on this. I could be wrong.

Post this over in Operating Systems. Someone over there will know.

 

[edblor]

Whether or not that drive is bootable, means nothing to XP. It simply has not been informed that you want to access the drive.

If you want the data on that drive, you will need to back it up. If you do not care about the data on that drive, right click it from within Disk Management, and partition it.

As for why you boot from Crive, it is because that is what your BIOS is set to.

As for wiping the boot sector on your slave drive, the only way to do that, is to disconnect all of your hard drives, but the slave drive, boot up using a floppy boot disk, and type "fdisk /MBR" at the command prompt (in this case A:\)

Good luck,

Edblor

 

[tuki99]

3 questions:

Do the relative positions of the hard drives on the IDE cable make any difference if the drives are correctly jumpered for master/slave?

Can I create a boot floppy for XP from within XP?

If I do as you suggest (fdisk/MBR) will that ONLY affect the boot sector, or will it wipe the entire drive? (I really don't want to lose the data. If I need to make a backup, I'll have to find another win98 system with a CD-R to make copies, because I don't have another system here running win98.)

Your info about the boot sector makes sense, because I had copied the windows folder from my old C: drive to this drive, in case I needed it for a backup, so I guess the boot info is still there. The good news is that it sounds like the data is recoverable, which makes me feel a whole lot better.

 

[edblor]

The positions of the drives on the IDE chain should not make a diff. Some will say it does, but it really should not!

Regarding my info about fdisk /mbr, please ensure that the slave drive is the ONLY drive connected when you do that! That command will wipe out the MBR of the drive connected, and install a clean one.

Regarding keeping your DATA intact after that command, fdisk'ing the MBR in such a way, does nothing to the DATA on the drive.

However, I cannot promise that after you do that, and plug everything back in, that WinXP will allow you to access that drive with the current DATA on it!

In my experience, if the filesystem on the drive is supported (and it more than likely is), XP should simply integrate the new drive into your system. It may "force" you to format/partition the drive before you can access the free space.

Regarding creating a boot floppy from within XP:

Windows XP Professional can create an MS-DOS boot disk. Just right- click Drive A in My Computer and choose Format. When the Format dialog box opens, select the 'Create an MS-DOS startup disk' check box and click Start.

Enjoy

Edblor