MS-DOS not seeing drive D Closed

Question

I have a computer (Gateway) that normally runs Windows XP. This computer has two hard drives (C and D).

Following the instruction in the Help files, I made an MS-DOS boot disk (floppy) in drive A.

When booted from this floppy, the machine works OK, but I find that only drives A and C are visible to MS-DOS. Typing "d:" at the prompt results in an "invalid drive specification" message.

What changes do I need to make to be able to access both drives C and D?

Thanks,

ac3mark · Answer

Well, does BIOS find them both?  IF you can boot into bios, look at the drives there.  If the D drive is of another type SCSI or IDE, you may not have the drivers included to load on the disk.  What type of drives are they?

Bopper · Answer

Thought I had answered this, but don't see my reply, so I'll try again.

The BIOS does see both drives, both of which are IDE drives. C is a 40 GB Western Digital drive, and D is a 250 GB Western Digital drive.

When I am running under Windows XP, both drives work just fine.

kieferschild · Answer

Is it possible that the "D" drive is getting another letter when in DOS?

Bopper · Answer

I am not aware that such a thing can happen without intervention. I know that it did not have D, E, or F...I tried them.

ac3mark · Answer

You c0uld lways run fdisk, just dont tmaper with them.  You could try:
wmic logicaldisk get name

That will verify the list.

I guarantee you are not loading IDE drivers when the DOS loads!

Bopper · Answer

I checked the C: directory and found two FDISK.EXE files, as shown

FDISK    EXE        63,916  04-23-99  10:22p
FDISK    EXE        63,916  02-23-13  9:19p

They were of course in different directories.

They were copied, one at a time, to A:, and run. In both cases, the result was the error message...

	Incorrect MS-DOS version

According to Wikipedia, the FDISK utility has been replaced by DISKPART. 

According to a search on C: there are three copies of DISKPART.EXE as shown:

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
08/04/2004  12:56 AM           163,840 diskpart.exe

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$
03/31/2003  12:00 PM           145,920 diskpart.exe

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
08/04/2004  12:56 AM           163,840 diskpart.exe

The two that are the same size have different creation dates.

Should I make any attempt to use DISKPART, and if so, which one?

Thanks for your help.

Bopper · Answer

DiskPart was run and LIST DISK correctly noted the presence of C, D (both hard drives), E (a CD-ROM, and F (a hard drive connected through the USB port). C was noted as being an FAT32 drive, and D as NTFS, which is correct.

Both sizes were correctly stated, but the free space, in both cases, was incorrectly reported as 0.

I have wondered it the NTFS-type of drive D is the reason why MS-DOS will not see it. I can do a FAT32 format from DOS if need be.

MS-DOS not seeing drive D

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