Hard Drive

[Bebi]

I bought 2 new hard drive (seagat 250gb 7200rpm) and I set one to master and one to slave via jumpers and plugged them in and by bios detects them as master and slave but the slave does not appear in my "My Computer" but it is in the bios but I cannot add it to the boot order it is in the subsection "Hard Drive" which only replaces the master, do I need to format it somehow or what happened

[lynx]

You need to go into disk management (via Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management), then partition and format the drive.

[Bebi]

what category is that under? if its under disk management then the drive doesnt show there either

[Virtualbody1234]

If you have 2 drives connected then you should see Disk 0 and Disk 1 in the Disk Management lower part of the screen. Partition and format it there.

If not then check in the Device Manager under Disk drives. Both drive should be listed.

[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.

[Virtualbody1234]

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.

Yeah, I've been though the same thing. What a pain.

[RPerry]

I had something simillar happen with my new dual layer DVD-RW. The pc would not assign a drive letter. It appeared in the device manager and everything I ended up disabling both my virtual drives, then mine appeared. Wonder what the deal is with Windows xp ?