Adding second hard drive problem

[fjorner]

hey folks

i summon the infinite wisdom of anandtech (ommmm)

Added a second IDE hard drive as the slave drive.

Windows XP Pro sees it but wont' assign it a volume, so I can't access it. But it's reported as Healthy(active).

In properties, under volumes,
Disk 1,
Type Basic,
Status Online,
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR),
Capacity 19461 (which is correct),
Unallocated Space 0,
Reserved Space 0.

In the volumes box, there's simply a picture of a hard drive drive symbol, no drive letter, and the correct capacity. Populate is grayed out and properties does nothing.

In disk management, it shows up under Disk 0 as a Basic, 19.00gb, Online with a healthy(active) 19gb NTFS partition, but the only options I have are properties (same as in device manager) and delete partition.

Ned to transfer data off the disk to the main drive. Can't delete partition, reformat, etc.


So what's up with this?

 

[phalsedoom]

check the jumpers on your cdrom. usually when I have this problem it is due to the jumper settings of my cdrom conflciting with the hard drive.

 

[Lord Evermore]

If the jumpers aren't the issue, use a Linux boot disk that reads NTFS to see if the partition is actually readable at all.

Where did the drive come from if it already has data that you need? Can you test it in that original system?

Hmm. Doing a search in MS's knowledge base, seems to confirm my suspicion. You currently have two drives marked as Active. Your main C drive, the System drive, is of course active (check properties, it pretty much has to be), and the drive you installed had an active partition on it. You can only have one active partition in a system. It most likely will not assign a drive letter because Windows always makes the active partition the C drive.

If the System partition does not show as Active, which I don't think is possible since you were able to boot the machine, then you might just need to set that as active. If they are both listed as active, then you need to make the second drive partition NOT active. I haven't found a way to do that yet... You might be able to use the DISKPART command line utility to manually set the system partition as active again, which might remove the active setting on the other drive.

 

[myocardia]

Just buy a 3.5" IDE external USB enclosure, and you should be able to grab all those old files with no problems.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Unless the problem just follows the drive...

This isn't a "drive not recognized by the system" issue. It's something wrong with the partition setup.