Hard Drive not accessible in Windows 2000 1

[xristoforos]

Hi,

I hope someone could help me with this as it is driving me crazy!
I have just installed an extra HDD (Seagate 340015A) as a Slave to my Master Drive. There are no hang ups and all goes as normal straight into Windows 2000. However when you try and access the drive through my computer it is not there?!?
Though device manager and hardware profiles says the device is there and working properly I can not actually access it. I have run the Seagate Disc wizard which says it is set up fine, I also run the Seagate Diagnostic tool which says the drive is in perfect order and working fine.
I have tried both cable select and simple slave settings but to no avail...
Someone please help!

 

[BIS]

Did you format this new drive?

 

[xristoforos]

The drive was bought used from ebay, so I am assuming that it has been formatted as the description stated that it was fully operational

 

[wolluf]

If I were selling a drive I'd wipe it completely clean - ie, no partitions. Suspect you just need to partition/format it from disk management (run diskmgmt.msc).

 

[xristoforos]

Wolluf, I tried the disk manager from Windows 2000 and the drive does not appear in the list of hard drives available. The master HDD is present as well as DVD and CD. Will I need to find the drive from DOS?

 

[BIS]

If the drive was wiped it would have no file system, and windows would not see it. Could also have a file system that windows doesn't recognize (ext3 for example). Your best bet is to go to the manufacturers website and look for a utility to format the drive. It will probably be a boot floppy, so when you are formating it - make sure that you are 100% sure that you are formatting the right drive. You would not want to format your existing drive and loose all data...

 

[wolluf]

BIS - disk management is there to PUT a file system onto a drive - so of course it can see blank drives - how else would you partition/format one? And if it has a non-windows partition, disk management will still show it as a partition - but more importantly it will show the drive.

xristoforos - if the drive is not appearing in disk management, there's something wrong. Are you sure its appearing in device manager? (if its there, then are you sure its NOT in diskmgmt.msc?) Does it appear on the POST screen (ie, is the bios correctly detecting it).

If you boot from a win98 boot floppy (

http://www.bootdisk.com

if you need one) and run fdisk, does it have option 5 (change drive), and if so, can you change to this second drive and get fdisk to display details?

 

[BIS]

ooops...
Thanks for pointing that out wolluf.
xristoforos, aplogies if I managed to confuse you.