help with 2nd hard drive

joe316

hi, i had to recently wipe all the stuff off my main drive which my os on it, i had 3 hds before this one for the os and some programs, the 2nd one for games and storage of utilities, etc. and a third external one for music, games.

i have the 1st one now working with the os again but the 2nd one is not showing up in my computer it is recognised in the bios.

the drives are sata ones and im running xp home.

if was to upgrade to xp pro and leave both the hds in during installation (the 2nd one wasnt in during the xp home installation) would it recognise it?

i really cant lose the data on this hard drive

thanks in advance for any help received

odie

When installing the OS, it would have asked to press F6 to install Raid drivers at the bottom of the screen near the start of installation. You would need the files from the Mobo CDRom.
These are needed by windows to recognise SATA drives.
Not sure if this can be done post install

SparrowHawk

Hi joe316,

Are the hd's setup in the same way as prior to re-install? It may have to do with how your array was setup - if you had an array that is?

During bootup you'll see "hit F11 (or something)" to enter array configuration.

If you need to recreate your array (note: NOT rebuild) similiar to prior your reinstall, it should be possible - if disk setup (partitions, etc.) & array type chosen are identical.

This may be the problem - & I accept no reponsibility if you lose data - I know it's of know help to you now, but three words for you - BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.

I had to learn the hard way too

SH

Kazujo

Do both hard drives show up in device manager at all, are there any ! or ?'s on the SATA controller or hard drives. It might be worth running the scan system for changes option in device manager to look for the hard drive, or diconnect it boot windows and then reconnect and boot into windows again to see if it detects the configuration change on boot.

You could also have a look at the disk management section in control panel.

BeardyGit

You don't need SATA drivers as such - If you're booting into your O/S installed on one SATA drive you're sorted. You also don't need to do anything about your integrated SATA/RAID controller (if present) as you've stated you're just using two disks in the PC, each as a completely different volume. By default your PC will be quite happy with this configuration and require you to do nothing more to get hardware level access to each disk.

Before you do anything else check that you've installed SP1 as a minimum and installed the hotfixes/driver for large disk access (for drives over approx. 127GB in capacity) - Either from Microsoft or from the HDD manufacturer. The other option would be to just install SP2 for XP which will take care of everything.....

Then:

Right click on "my computer"
Click "manage"
Click on "Disk Management" under the storage section

If you can see the disk listed but no drive letter assigned for it (most likely) you will need to right click on the disk in the lower right hand panel, right click on the disk and either "assign a drive letter" or "change drive letter and paths".

joe316

thanks for all the advice guys, yeah ive had a look at disk management, i think the disc is there, there is a drive called disc1 but there is no details about size, type like there is with disc0, it says disc1 is foreign and dynamic when i right clicked it it gave me the option of changing it to a basic disc but i would lose all the data on it.

BeardyGit

Install service pack 2 before you do anything else. Don't take any risks now.

joe316

i ve upgraded to sp2, had a look at disk management and the drive is still there, but it is still dynamic and where it says the disc's location there is a little warning logo over it.

Kazujo

Did you have it setup as a dynamic disk in the very begining?

joe316

i honestly cant remember i got the hard drive over a year ago, i think it was basic but i cant say for sure