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

Trouble with Slave Drive in Windows XP

Status
Not open for further replies.

air33

Technical User
May 12, 2003
2
US
Updated PC from Windows 98SE to XP by purchasing XP Home & a new hard drive.
Installed the new hard drive as master, installed old HD as slave (note: the old HD was partitioned via. FDISK into two drives of equal size 10GB).
CMOS saw everything O.K. and installed XP & all Win Updates.
Cannot access the slave drive!
Disk Management screen top right shows the new HD as a volume (C:) and below it, the first partition of the Slave drive with no drive letter. Only option avail when right click is Delete Partition & Help.
Disk Management screen bottom right shows the new HD O.K. and shows old HD as one primary partition.
I have done this on another PC with no problem, so I know it can be done, but I have tried all that I know.
 
Since, by the sounds of it, there is no data on the old hard drive, insert your 98 boot disk and boot up! Re-check your partitions (on old disk) in fdisk to ensure they are there! Get back out to dos and format the two 10 gb partitions. Afterwards, boot back into XP and check to see if they are now visible.

Cheers

Thx for all comments and advice given ;)
 
The drive will not be visible until it is formatted. Try again under Dism Management, it is sometimes fools you because the drive display needs to be scrolled.

Double click the drive entry and let XP format the partitions.

 
The drives WILL be visible even UN-FORMATTED.. but the partitions MUST be installed correctly.. once you have the partions right you can format them from within WINDOWS.
 
Kofy,

It is rude to shout with your capslock key.

And, it is simply not true that the drives are visible unformatted. The devices can be seen in Disk Management, but as drives they are not visible unless formatted.
 

It is also true that if Windows XP sees another "ACTIVE" partition (as in the one from your old windows hard drive) I will mark those partitions as "Hidden".

The only way around this that I have found is to use something like Partition Magic and convert the old active partition to a logical drive and not primary/active.

This should then make them visible to the XP Operating System.

Good luck!

 
Thanks for all the help. The culprit was GoBack. I booted to my old hard drive (which did contain valuable data), disabled GoBack & rebooted. After sucessful boot to Win98 w/o GoBack, shut down and made old drive slave, and re-connected the new, Win XP drive. The old drive then was in explorer as it should be.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top