Additional Hard drives not visible in Win2K Pro..HELP

[mspiko]

I am using win2K Pro (service pack4)I upgraded my main drive (western Digital 100Gig 8MB cache) to a Western Digital 160Gig 8MB cache. Originally I had an older 30Gig Western digital set as a slave for my music projects.
With the new drive I have the 160Gig as my master drive where the OS is installed. I cleaned out the original 100gig before changing drives, making sure to delete any remaining OS information to prevent any confusion for windows, then made it a slave drive.I have the 30 gig setup as a seperate slave(but since left the drive off to first solve the problem with the 100). On the 100gig I have 37gigs of Home video and pictures on the drive to make home DVDs.
When I boot up the computer, my Bios detects all three drives. In Win2k PRO They show up in the "Device Manager" listed as valid,working drives. However The drives do not show up in "My Computer" and I cannot access them.
All three drives are partitioned with NTSF. How can I access these drives without having to reformat? If anyone can help, you would save me from losing over a years worth of work. Thank you to all whom may help.

 

[pudda]

From

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...mFueX4mcF9zb3J0X2J5PWRmbHQmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=

Adding a Second Drive:
Make sure your drive is identified on the boot up screen. If not, please refer to our knowledge base article on how to identify drives in your BIOS, Answer ID 54.

Access Disk Management by first clicking on the Start button.

Select Run.

In the text box type diskmgmt.msc and click OK

When Disk Management opens, a wizard may appear entitled: Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard.
Note: You must use this wizard to write a Signature to the drive otherwise, the drive will not work with Windows XP. If the wizard does not appear, you may need to manually complete this process following the steps below:



Right click on the name of the drive to be initialized. (Drives are numbered as follows: drive 0 being the boot drive and drive 1-3 are all other drives. For CDs, the first CD is CD 0 the second CD 1 and so forth.)

Choose Initialize from the menu that appears.

The next screen shows the drive you selected to initialize. Make sure the drive is checked and click Next.

You will have the option to convert the drive from basic to dynamic storage.
Leave this unchecked and click Next.

Click Finish




The test continues...

 

[mspiko]

Thank you for the tip. However I tried it and it was
unsuccessful. I am using Windows 2000 professional. I'm
not too sure if that is the reason. However I really wish
to not lose all the information to those drives. Any other
tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[wolluf]

Try disconnecting the 2 'slave drives', and starting 2k so it knows it only has the one drive. Then reconnect just the 100GB and see if 2k now detects it properly.

(jumpers correct?)

If you have no joy, you could always reinstall 2k on the 100GB drive, then do the copy the other way round.

 

[mspiko]

I tried that, though with no luck. If I install win2k on the 100 gig, since it is not being recognized, I will be instructed to reformat the drive. If I do that, then I lose all the information that is still on that drive(which I am trying to prevent). Does anyone know of any descent software to recover files from unaccessable drives?

 

[wolluf]

mspiko - its only not being recognised from within the 2k install on the new disk. If you start the install by booting from win2k install CD (with the 100Gb disk as master, new 160Gb as slave), odds on it will recognise the partition on the 100 and just let you install into it without formatting. IF it doesn't recognise partition, then there is a problem with it (rather than just your 2k's recognition powers) and you will be best running a data recovery app to try to find your data.