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3 inter hard drives not recognized by Windows

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Fustrated - Jul 26, 2009 at 02:39 PM
 gary - Jul 30, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Hello,
I have a Dell XPS with 4 SATA hard drives. I needed to reformat the "C" drive and reload Windows XP. After doing so, my "C" drive came up as the "I" drive and the other 3 were not recognized! They contain my data. Since one was completely empty, I reformatted it and it was then recognized as a "D" drive. The other 2 are still not recognized by Windows but the system "sees" them.

I have been copying my data files from an external hard drive onto the the new "D" drive and installing software on the "I" drive from the external hard drive until this morning. Now I can't copy files from the external drive if they are .exe files. I also can no longer execute the software installation files on the external hard drive. I receive the message that I don't have permission or may not have the proper permissions.

I cleaned out my "Temp" folder and looked at the folders on the external drive for permissions. The folders were all marked "Read Only" so I unchecked the box but they were immediately changed back to "Read Only". Since I only had a limited number of expendable files on a 3rd drive, I just finished re-formating it and it is not listed as my "E" drive. I do not want to re-format the 4th hard drive since it has my primary data and installation software. I am about to do a system restore back to Friday (2 days ago) before the system updated Windows XP to Service Pack 3. Maybe the Service Pack is what changed the "read only".

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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2 responses

Answer 1 / 2
sadgurl Posts 697 Registration date Thursday May 14, 2009 Status Member Last seen November 24, 2010 219
Jul 30, 2009 at 11:03 AM
Dear Sir,

Please make sure that your bios is detecting these hard drive,

If not you will need to update your bios

Thanks
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Answer 2 / 2
gary
Jul 30, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Thanks for the reply. The bios recognizes the hard drives. I checked all the connections including switching around the connections. I also ran diagnostics and found that the motherboard has a problem.

Since I posted the first message, I called Dell. They don't know why they were not recognized and couldn't help (surprise). I am going to reformat the hard drives. As it turns out, my motherboard is bad and they are going to replace it. Luckily, I have most of my data backed up to my laptop and an external drive. I just didn't update the backups for a coup of weeks. Not too bad under the circumstances.
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