Originally Posted by
clocker
An interesting story....
Just yesterday I was assembling a new build for a customer.
We were going to use the two HDDs (a WD80GB and a WD 120GB) from his Gateway PC (the ever popular black/silver "giant toaster" model).
He brough in his Gateway, we plugged it in and he dragged all the data from the 80GB to the larger drive.
The 80 was to be his C: (OS) drive and the other a slave.
No prob.
Installed the drives, wiped/formatted/installed XP...all was fine.
Except the 120GB drive was nowhere to be found in My Computer.
No combination of jumpers would make it appear.
The drive showed up in BIOS and even in Disk Management...it was Disk1, it was healthy, I could even see how much free space was available....but Windows would not assign it a drive letter, so it could not be accessed.
Not at all good.
Anyone have any ideas what the problem ( and ultimate fix) turned out to be?
The clues are obvious, once you know what to look for....
Oh, OK, I'll tell you.
It was the damn Gateway "Go-Back" software....an even bigger POS than Microsoft's (later) System Restore app.
It must modify the MBR on it's subject disks to the point where Windows can kinda see them, but doesn't know what to do with them.
In desperation I put the drive back into the Gateway and fired it up.
As there was no longer an OS present the PC could not boot ( although it made a valiant effort to do so), but I could access the GoBack and remove it from the drive.
This took 3 1/2 hours.
Reinstalled into the new machine and all was well.
What a relief.
Damn Gateway.
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