HardDrive not being picked up

tommycahir · 26-01-2006 2:25pm #1

hi all

ok got a new rig (thx to lazygit) now have started to transfer bits from my old one to my new one mainly a dvdrw drive and a 160gb harddrive ( WESTERN DIGITAL IDE) OK so all my old data is on the 160GB WD drive and when i go into my computer to view it, it simply isnt there, either was the DVD RW drive until i did a bit of messing with the jumpers on the drives.

I now have the 160gb drive set as master and the DVD RW as a slave and the DVD-RW drive appears but still no HD. When i go into the Disk Management section of the administrative tools i can see the HD labeled as DISK 1 and it says un-initialised.

has anybody seen this before? i have previously just hooked up HD's and they were auto picked up by windows and never had a problem.

Just for reference i also have the following drives in the machine
Harddisk1: 120GB SATA
Harddisk2: 80GB SATA
Harddisk3: 120GB IDE ( on a seperate IDE cable to the DVD RW and 160GB HD)

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

smeggle · 26-01-2006 2:33pm

Set the drive to secondary slave or cs (cable select) - one of either of those two options will see the drive. you may need to try both, myself I'd try cs first.

re-boot, go into computer management and see if it's there. If not re-boot and check your bios settings. You may need to mount the drive there first for the machine to see it.

Mostly I just set them as a slave and it's in CM when I boot up and install from there..

smeggle · 26-01-2006 2:35pm

*Doh* double post

tommycahir · 26-01-2006 2:39pm

I tried putting both the DVD RW and the HD in CS and it didnt pick up either of the drives and if i set both of them to slave will there be a conflict?

Does it matter that the second IDE drive is on a different IDE cable?

aaf · 26-01-2006 2:40pm

You need to mark it as active in the disk management section. Right-click on the drive in the lower half of the screen. If that fails, maybe do a full format and make sure it's marked as active when done. It may also need to be initialised as a primary partition. You should set both hard drives to cable select.

tommycahir · 26-01-2006 2:45pm

If at all possible formatting the drive is the very last option as all of my data is on that drive bout 80GBs or so.
When i select the drive in disk management and then right click it doesnt give me an option to set to active. The only option that I can select is one to initiaise the disk.

aaf · 26-01-2006 2:53pm

tommycahir wrote:

The only option that I can select is one to initiaise the disk.

I think that's the option to take then. I'm not 100% sure whether your 80 gigs of data will be there after you do but from what I can recall, initialising a disk only takes seconds so not enough time there to do any real damage. It's up to you! Maybe you might be best holding off for somebody else's advice on this or try google

smeggle · 26-01-2006 2:55pm

yeah well thats what you want to do iniciate the drive.

Depending on your way of setting up each ide cable can handle two drives - primary master and slave and your other ide secondary master and slave.

I'd set that up as primary master and put the second hd (the 160) on as slave and put the dvd on the secondary as a secondary master... Works on mine and I have my old dvd/cd-r combi as a secondary slave.

hd's on one cable the primary and opticles on secondary..it's teh way I do it anyway...

gamer · 26-01-2006 3:48pm

i think u need to go to dos prompt,type fdisk , use menu, set it as primary active.drive o. i assume its drive c:\ main drive,ie set c:\ drive 0, set it as an active partition, ie thats the drive that boots up.os, windows .that is the 1st partition.wait,then when its active,type exit. knock off pc completely .see does drive c:\ boot up.FDISK allows u to look at partition info, ie fdisk c:\ first.

irlrobins · 26-01-2006 5:07pm

also make sure you use the correct cable connector. If it's a slave drive it should be on bottom connector of ribbon, it's master it should be on the connector at the top or end of the ribbon. Kinda obvious but somepeople don't twig this....

I'd set that up as primary master and put the second hd (the 160) on as slave and put the dvd on the secondary as a secondary master... Works on mine and I have my old dvd/cd-r combi as a secondary slave.

hd's on one cable the primary and opticles on secondary..it's teh way I do it anyway...

I agree.

tommycahir · 27-01-2006 7:17am

ok guys thanks for help. managed to pick up the HD after making sure that the IDE drives were all on the one cable and the optical on another thought this did not entirely resolve the issue . when i then went to access the drive i kept getting prompted to say that the HD was not formatted and do i wish to format.!! obviously i said no

then i decided to take the drastic action of entirely refreshing the system by re-installing XP. now i have encountered another problem.

when the windows xp pro disc was picking up the data for the c: drive it picked it up saying that it was 58000 MB which is incorrect it should have been 80GB. i know there was some issues with previous versions of windows and large HD volumes( thought it was resolved by XP though). Any ideas on the new problem?

HardDrive not being picked up

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