Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Chris Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Secondary Harddrive not showing up in my comp 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

RoboZIG

Technical User
Sep 20, 2007
3
US
I just reinstalled windows on my comp on a new hdd. I Have connected the old hdd as the secondary and would like to retrieve some files off of it before I format it. However, My Computer nor Explorer have it listed as a drive. I have tried to add new hardware but when I select the old hdd it says it is installed and working properly. I have gone to device manager and it says same thing. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers. gone into bios, it has it listed as the slave ide drive.

any suggestions or ideas?
 
Try setting to CS (Cable select) and see if that flies...
 
I don't think Cable Select will help. Unless you jumpered the drive wrong, in which case it probably wouldn't even get picked up by BIOS

what Windows did the old HDD have, and What is the New Windows on the new HDD.

Typically when a drive is found by BIOS but does not appear in Windows Explorer, its either not formatted, or has suffered File system corruption, or maybe the file system can't be read by the current OS.

If this is Windows XP: Right click my Computer, select Manage, Choose Storage, Disk Management and see if it shows up there.

If all else fails you might need some data recovery software to read the drive contents

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
vacunita is spot on, as usual.

Was the old drive formatted as NTFS? If so, there have been numerous reports on the forums here where users of NTFS formatted volumes either reformatted their system partition or placed the drive in another XP machine only to find their NTFS partitions seemed to have disappeared. The only resolution to this phenomenon so far is use of a data recovery applications such as GetDataBack.

Another thing to ask is did the old drive have a program called GoBack installed? If so, then either reinstall it on the new drive or see this KB for other options:
 
Thanx Freestone and you also bring up a good point: Goback seems to cause lots of problems when moving drives from one PC to another.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
well the old HDD had go back on it and was windows xp with NTFS. I did forget to mention the reason I had to reinstall windows on a new HDD was because the old one got some bad virus on it that pretty much ate winjdows. It got to the point that I couldn't even log into windows anymore I would log it and when it was saying retrieving user setting it would then say logging off windows. Did same thing in safe mode. I'll try and find some data recory software.

any other suggestions based on the new info?
 
If it does indeed have Goback, you'll need to install go back on the new drive so it can be read correctly. you should then be able to access the drive normally.

You can also use the Microsoft article Freestone linked to to try to deactivate Goback.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
See my previous post. GoBack has made changes on your OLD hard drive boot sector and partition table(s) such that your NEW XP install doesn't recognize it.

Since the old drive won't boot, my reference to the Microsoft KB can't be applied.

You can try installing GoBack on your NEW drive so your old drive will be recognized.

Or try to remove GoBack:

 
thanks both of you for the help. I disabled go back and as soon as I booted with the new hdd it worked. thanks again. I got all of my old info and have formatted the old disk. you guys helped a lot. I had asked around to a lot of people and no one had any idea. you guys got it right with barely knowing my comp. thanks.
 
I'll have give this one to Freestone. I never would of thought of GoBack had he not mentioned it.

So a Star to him from me.

Anyway, glad you got it sorted out.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
Thanks, vacunita. If it isn't GoBack that is the culprit then it's usually a NTFS formatted partition that disappears. I wish I had a fix for that problem other than data recovery. Never have read of anyone here complaining of a FAT32 partition disappearing.
 
Yeah neither have I. NTFS tends to disappear, more frequently, but I have yet to discover solid reason for it.

Goback, yes can be a pain, and these days is noticeably more often than not, the culprit.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top