Cannot access old hard drive on new pc?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jason
  • Start date Start date
J

Jason

Hi everyone,
I am looking for an answer to a question which has been bugging me for
months now. The problem is when I install a second hard drive, from my
old Compaq deskpro, in my new home built system. I have read of many
others in this group having a similar problem, i.e.. cannot access the
second drive. The drive is recognised in the bios and in device manager
but WinXP, explorer, disk manager, etc.. cannot see it or allow access
to it.

This older drive is a 40gig Hitachi DeskStar with Win2k installed on a
primary partition. I can't remember if I formatted this disk as a
dynamic disk though as this could be part of the problem as I am using
XP Home Edition. Naturally, I don't want to format the drive as i wish
to keep the data on it.

Normally I should be able to boot straight to the older disk if it is
set as Master and the boot disk in the Bios, but i cant boot at all from
this disk? It spins up for 45- 60 seconds and then spins down again.

I have tried the following without success:

1. Changed BIOS settings to enable 48bit LBA.
2. Boot from old drive.
3. Disabled Smart for hard drives.
4. Enabled and Disabled Boot Sector Virus Checker.
5. Changed all drive jumper settings from Master to Slave and Vice
Versa.
6. Installed Win2K on a third hard drive but still cannot see it?
7. Updated BIOS and drivers with the latest releases.

All without success. What am I doing wrong? What else can I do? Please
help me before i tear all my hair out.

Cheers Jase.
 
Jason said:
Hi everyone,
I am looking for an answer to a question which has been bugging me for
months now. The problem is when I install a second hard drive, from my
old Compaq deskpro, in my new home built system. I have read of many
others in this group having a similar problem, i.e.. cannot access the
second drive. The drive is recognised in the bios and in device manager
but WinXP, explorer, disk manager, etc.. cannot see it or allow access
to it.

This older drive is a 40gig Hitachi DeskStar with Win2k installed on a
primary partition. I can't remember if I formatted this disk as a
dynamic disk though as this could be part of the problem as I am using
XP Home Edition. Naturally, I don't want to format the drive as i wish
to keep the data on it.

Normally I should be able to boot straight to the older disk if it is
set as Master and the boot disk in the Bios, but i cant boot at all from
this disk? It spins up for 45- 60 seconds and then spins down again.

I have tried the following without success:

1. Changed BIOS settings to enable 48bit LBA.
2. Boot from old drive.
3. Disabled Smart for hard drives.
4. Enabled and Disabled Boot Sector Virus Checker.
5. Changed all drive jumper settings from Master to Slave and Vice
Versa.
6. Installed Win2K on a third hard drive but still cannot see it?
7. Updated BIOS and drivers with the latest releases.

All without success. What am I doing wrong? What else can I do? Please
help me before i tear all my hair out.

Cheers Jase.
Click to expand...

- Install the old disk as a slave disk.
- Make sure it is recognised by the BIOS.
- Launch Win2000.
- Run diskmgmt.msc via Start / Run, then assign drive letters
to the partitions on the old disk.
 
Pegasus said:
- Install the old disk as a slave disk.
- Make sure it is recognised by the BIOS.
- Launch Win2000.
- Run diskmgmt.msc via Start / Run, then assign drive letters
to the partitions on the old disk.
Click to expand...
Tried that one already. Can see the drive on the BIOS set up but it will
not boot into win2k.
 
Jason said:
Tried that one already. Can see the drive on the BIOS set up but it will
not boot into win2k.
Click to expand...

Mmh. Why should a slave disk boot? You're still booting with
a functioning Win2000 disk, with the problem disk attached
as a slave disk!
 
A Win2k/winxp boot drive removed from one sys, cannot be used in another
sys, as master boot drive!, without going through some loops.
It will never boot as a 'slave drive boot'
 
Jason said:
Hi everyone,
I am looking for an answer to a question which has been bugging me for
months now. The problem is when I install a second hard drive, from my old
Compaq deskpro, in my new home built system. I have read of many others in
this group having a similar problem, i.e.. cannot access the second drive.
The drive is recognised in the bios and in device manager but WinXP,
explorer, disk manager, etc.. cannot see it or allow access to it.

This older drive is a 40gig Hitachi DeskStar with Win2k installed on a
primary partition. I can't remember if I formatted this disk as a dynamic
disk though as this could be part of the problem as I am using XP Home
Edition. Naturally, I don't want to format the drive as i wish to keep the
data on it.

Normally I should be able to boot straight to the older disk if it is set
as Master and the boot disk in the Bios, but i cant boot at all from this
disk? It spins up for 45- 60 seconds and then spins down again.

I have tried the following without success:

1. Changed BIOS settings to enable 48bit LBA.
2. Boot from old drive.
3. Disabled Smart for hard drives.
4. Enabled and Disabled Boot Sector Virus Checker.
5. Changed all drive jumper settings from Master to Slave and Vice Versa.
6. Installed Win2K on a third hard drive but still cannot see it?
7. Updated BIOS and drivers with the latest releases.

All without success. What am I doing wrong? What else can I do? Please
help me before i tear all my hair out.

Cheers Jase.
Click to expand...
First, try new hd jumpered as Master. Set old hd as slave. Attach both
to same ide. Ensure the dual cable is good AND 80-connector.
Should this not work, try jumpering both as cable-select(as Stargazer
said), still both on same ide & cable. HTH, s
 
Jason said:
Hi everyone,
I am looking for an answer to a question which has been bugging me for
months now. The problem is when I install a second hard drive, from my
old Compaq deskpro, in my new home built system. I have read of many
others in this group having a similar problem, i.e.. cannot access the
second drive. The drive is recognised in the bios and in device manager
but WinXP, explorer, disk manager, etc.. cannot see it or allow access
to it.
Click to expand...


What brand is the newer drive..Western digital? If so , remember that there
is a setting for master (lone drive) and Master with slave. Some compaq
harddrives were permanently jumpered for master. No matter what you set the
exterior jumper to, the internal setting over rides it. Sometmes CS (cable
select) lets you get around this, providing you are using an 80 conductor
ribbon cable. BTW change the cable and see if that fixes it.
 
I sincerely hope someone is watching this thread as I now have three
drives in my pc. Just installed Win2K on a second HD to see if I can
access the older IBM DeskStar, from the Compaq, but still no joy. I have
tried setting the drives to Cable Select and moved them around in the
bays to use both connectors. Used all combinations of master and slave
but still no joy?

Even after all this, I STILL CANNOT ACCESS THE DRIVE!!!

The set up is this:

.. 160gig Seagate Barracuda with WinXP Home Edition
.. 200gig Seagate Barracuda with Win2K
.. 40gig IBM Deskstar with Win2K (the old drive)

Everything appears in the BIOS and Device Manager but Disk Management
does not show the IBM drive. I can access both Seagate disks from each
other without a problem and everything I have says the IBM disk is
working fine. Even tempted to try booting from Linux?

What can I do as I need to jump through some really serious hoops now?
 
sdlomi2 said:
First, try new hd jumpered as Master. Set old hd as slave. Attach both
to same ide. Ensure the dual cable is good AND 80-connector.
Should this not work, try jumpering both as cable-select(as Stargazer
said), still both on same ide & cable. HTH, s
Click to expand...
Tried this already. No luck. Have so far spent the past few weeks
searching for answers on this and other NG's let alone support sites on
tinternet.
 
Jason said:
I sincerely hope someone is watching this thread as I now have three
drives in my pc. Just installed Win2K on a second HD to see if I can
access the older IBM DeskStar, from the Compaq, but still no joy. I have
tried setting the drives to Cable Select and moved them around in the
bays to use both connectors. Used all combinations of master and slave
but still no joy?

Even after all this, I STILL CANNOT ACCESS THE DRIVE!!!

The set up is this:

. 160gig Seagate Barracuda with WinXP Home Edition
. 200gig Seagate Barracuda with Win2K
. 40gig IBM Deskstar with Win2K (the old drive)

Everything appears in the BIOS and Device Manager but Disk Management
does not show the IBM drive. I can access both Seagate disks from each
other without a problem and everything I have says the IBM disk is
working fine. Even tempted to try booting from Linux?

What can I do as I need to jump through some really serious hoops now?
Click to expand...

The drive geometery set in your BIOS might be incorrect.
Try the various geometries you have available, e.g. LBA,
Large etc. Check the geometry used by your old Compaq
BIOS.

If you have a Drive Image recovery floppy boot disk, use it.
It will immediately tell you if the geometry is wrong.
 
do a fdisk /mbr on that drive
is that drives partition set as an active partition?
You did say that this a windows not recognizing the drive situation right?
the bios sees it but not windows.
and your using XP on a ntfs partition so that ntfs partitions can be seen by
the OS right?
 
JAD said:
do a fdisk /mbr on that drive
is that drives partition set as an active partition?
You did say that this a windows not recognizing the drive situation right?
the bios sees it but not windows.
and your using XP on a ntfs partition so that ntfs partitions can be seen by
the OS right?
Click to expand...

That is all correct. That's one of the reasons for loading Win2K on
another third drive. I thought the Win2K drive may have been formatted
as a Dynamic Disk which XP Home edition does not support.

I am beginning to think the drive has failed and I am exploring whether
recovery software may do the trick. I have used some freebie software
from Paragon which can read the sectors on the drive and that's why it
appears to be working allright?
 
Pegasus said:
others in



I thought that the disk worked fine in your Compaq PC?
Click to expand...
You are right. The disk worked perfectly fine in the Compaq PC. Thats
why I thought it may be a Dynamic Disk issue as XP Home Edition does not
support Dynamic Disks?
 
JAD said:
do a fdisk /mbr on that drive
is that drives partition set as an active partition?
You did say that this a windows not recognizing the drive situation right?
the bios sees it but not windows.
and your using XP on a ntfs partition so that ntfs partitions can be seen by
the OS right?
Click to expand...

Spot On!

TO follow up, I have run the IBM Hitachi Drive Fitness Test, the latest
version, and the results confirm that there is nothing wrong with the
drive. I have also installed HDDLife Pro which also confirms everything
is ok.

All my drives are formatted with NTFS so I dont see what the problem is?

Geting rather exhausted looking for the answer to this problem now?
 
DL said:
A Win2k/winxp boot drive removed from one sys, cannot be used in another
sys, as master boot drive!, without going through some loops.
It will never boot as a 'slave drive boot'
Click to expand...


Can you give more details about this problem?

My problem is similar...

Windows 2000 SP4. Drive loaded as primary master.
works great.
I plugged in an XP disk into secondary master and fiddled
around with it.
Removed XP disk.
Now, my w2K disk no longer boots as primary master.
If I move it to secondary master, it works fine.

This has happened more than once, although the process
to make it happen is not clear. Seems random.

When it happens, I can ghost the image back to the drive
and it works fine as primary master again.

This is my test system with plug-in ide drives that get
swapped around frequently. I NEED to swap drives around...
Win98 drives don't have this problem.

HOw do I fix/patch/recover this?
Thanks, mike
 
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