I had a hard drive failure and bought a new Segate SATA Internal Hard Drive. As you can see it works fine. But I cannot get my second Western Digitial EIDE Hard Drive recognized. It has no oeprating system just ALL my personal files and stuff. I have tried every configuration I can think of with no luck. Any help greatelt appreciated!!
go to start > control panel (switch to Classic View) > administrative tools
> computer management > storage : disk management
your second disk will show, but not active(initialized)
need to make active by right clicking on window that represents then drive
then make active partition(drive)
select to create partition (if applicable)
select format (if applicable)
wait and drive will change status to "healthy" at top windows and your drive/data will now be accessible and visible in 'My Computer'
Some people will say you are wrong but that is not the case. I put an old 80 gig drive in a computer with xp service pack 1 on a 100 gig drive that has been in service for 6 years. It is partitioned into 3 partitions and has worked perfectly. But it refused !! to recognize the 80 gig drive.
The 80 gig drive IS recognized in the bios. It already had a copy of xp service pack 2 on it, I was putting it in for backup of the original drive. I booted from the 80 gig drive. It recognized the original drive, but of course did not have all the setup for programs on it. I tried different configurations with the old drive but the only way it would recognize the 80 gig drive was when I plugged it into a USB dongle and mounted it as an external drive. I did not try it on the secondary IDE channel, only the primary. But I did try it as both master and slave, no difference. The original drive with the older XP version refused to recognize the second physical drive!
The problem has to be with my version of XP. I don't know why, and I haven't put in a lot of time to try to figure it out because I only needed the drive for backup. The system may be a bit convoluted but I can use it for that. If I find an answer in the near future I will post it here.
Alright, this sparked my curiosity and I did some digging....
And it makes me feel really dumb!!!!!
When XP is installed with one hard drive, apparently the default is to not expect a second drive to be added!
The fix is to go to Control Panel; System; Hardware; Device Manager; IDE ATAPI controllers; Primary channel, properties; Advanced Settings; and make sure the Device 1 device type is set to Auto instead of None....
Reboot windows and it will recognize the second drive!
i actually have the same issue. bios will recognize my 2nd hard drive but I am not able to access it through my compluter. I tried what u said to do to change it to auto and everything was already set to auto. do you have any more ideas.
asus p5q mobo
nvidia 8800 graphics card
WD 750 GB hard drive.
Seagate 250 GB hard drive
4 gigs ram
intel 8800 quad 4
750 watt cooler master power supply
Blu-ray burner/player
"i actually have the same issue. bios will recognize my 2nd hard drive but I am not able to access it through my compluter. "
I killdisked the second hard drive and neither DOS nor win95 could then recognise it. It did show up in the BIOS.
I had a brainwave this morning. I own a copy of Partition Magic and I wondered if PM could do it.
IT COULD!!!!
I created a logical partition with PM which could then be seen by DOS and Windows. But the partition is smaller than the actual size of the hard disk. I have not yet found a way to enlarge it to the full size.
I am having the same problem. I would like to get the files off an old hard drive and your solution sounds like it would work for me. But what is a USB dongle?. Is it a special type of USB cable that has an IDE connection on the other end? I don't see where I would plug a usb into my old maxtor internal HD.
I'm not sure of this USB dongle adapter either. You need a power connection and an IDE cable to get your drive working. Either buy an external IDE hard drive case ($25-75), or simply open up your case, set the drives jumpers to slave or cable select, disconnect your cdrom drive, connect those cables up to the old hard drive, boot up your PC, copy your files over, shutdown, disconnect the hard drive and reconnect your cdrom. I think I explained it better earlier in the post.
If this is really confusing to you, let me know, and I'll simplify.
I tried this and it does not show up in the administrative disk management tool. If I uninstall my second drive in device manager and search for hardware changes it will find it again but I still cannot access it.
I am one of the many pepes that had the same problem.
Installed a second drive as a slave
Bios saw it but my computer did not
I tried what you said and with a few mods it worked
All I can say is THANK YOU for your generous help
Have never had this problem before
How the hell is a non-expert like me supposed to know all that???
I presume that this is due to XP
If it is, MS deserve a k*ck up the backside!!!
Computer systems are still way too complicated for the average user!
diggleydog Thank you so much, I was about ready to pull my hair out because I could not figure out how to make windows recognize my new hard drive. Followed your directions and it worked perfectly!
If you select format this will delete all the data he wants to keep. If you do not do format, this won't solve the problem, so this is not a solution. Does anyone have the solution? I have the same problem.
I had to do one more step before I could make the drive active. Which was to assign it a drive letter. So in case anyone has the same issue as me. Follow diggleydog's steps and assign a drive letter before activating.
Thanks for the tip, this worked great! I had the same situation, old drive with important files, righ clicked the import foreign disks, and bam! Family photos are back!
I see your quandry. Leave your dvdrom drive out for the time being. Boot your system up, you should be able to then go to my computer, and see your old hard drive. Open it up, copy your old files that you need (songs, pictures, documents...) to your new drive. After your sure that you have all your files, shut down, remove the old drive and hook your dvdrom drive back up, boot as normal and you're good.
You need to go into Windows disk management to put the HD online, and select the kind of partition you want it to be on. I have a blank IDE Drive that I installed and it wasn't recognized until I went into disk managememnt, put it online, and formatted. Once you get to disk management it is pretty self explanatory. It will show you all of your drives & sizes. right click on your installed drive and put it online first. This should at least get you started.
You're absolutely right, I have the same problem as the original guy, I have an old hard drive. I want to install it as a slave drive in my comp. I want to KEEP the data already on the drive. Therefore I DO NOT WANT TO FORMAT the drive unless this means something other than deleting all the files currently on the disk.
How do I get windows to access the drive???? Can anyone help please??
If you do, use that IDE and power cable and jumper setting.
Take the cdrom drive out.
Look at the back of it, where the ribbon cable and power cable are, there should be a white or black jumper on a couple of pins.
Look at that setting, and set your old hard drive to match it.
Plug your old hard drive into that IDE and power cable, making sure you set the jumper correctly.
Power on and check to see if you can see it now....if not, listen to the drive, is it spinning up, can you hear any odd noises, grinding, ticks...let me know.
6317 users have said thank you to us this month
