Cannot find HD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Siena
  • Start date Start date
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Siena

I've had to reformat for my c:(4gig) and d:(20gig) hard
drives and reinstalled Windows XP Professional and
subsequent upgrades (except SP1 - I'm having trouble with
that one).

Since doing all that, I cannot find my d: hard drive in
My Computer. When I try to find it with the command
prompt it states that the drive is not ready - it assumes
that my CD Rom drive is now D: (without a disk in it).

However, it does show up as a device in the system folder
in the control panel and it appears to be working
correctly. I've deleted the drivers for it and my system
found the HD and reinstalled the drivers for it. Upon
startup, it also shows up in the BIOS.

What am I missing? D: drive is empty and had no system
files on it. I had it working before as a partitioned
disk into two disks. I've since removed the partition
after reformatting.

Any advice would be welcome.

Thank you.
 
Right click on My Computer and select Manage. On the following screen,
select Disk Management. If it now shows up on the left hand side, assign it
a drive letter.

Cari
www.coribright.com
 
HI

4 Gig HDD is not good enough to run XP (at least 15GB to run XP and it may be the reason why you
have trouble during the installation of SP1) and I think it is an old HDD with ATA66 or less
I would suggest you to buy a new HDD with ATA100/133 7200RPM (80 GB for less than $100.-
Use the new HDD at master and the 20 GB HDD as slave
You can partition the new HDD to C drive (20GB) and the rest to D drive
The slave drive will become E drive and use it for pagefiles (virtual memory) and backup

Notes

1. Use a 40 Pin 80 conductors IDE cable to connect the two HDDs. Set the jumpers to auto detect for both HDDs
2. Enable UDMA mode in BIOS for both HDDs in the primary IDE channel
3. Create a pagefile in the slave drive to improve the PC performance
For example, set the mininum and maximun value to 368MB in C drive and then set mininum 256MB
and maxinum 768MB in the slave drive. You can just use the default pagefile in C drive when you installed X
and set the maximum value same as the defaulted mininum value. In this case, the pagefile is located at the
front portion of the HDD and would not be fragmented. Format the slave drive and create the pagefile immediately
The pagefile will also located at the front portion of the slave drive and would not be fragmented

How to change/set pagefile

Right click My Computer/Properties/Advance, click the setting button at the performance area, click the advance tab
click the change button in the virtual memory area, select the drive(s) and then change the settings

Pete


----- Siena wrote: ----

I've had to reformat for my c:(4gig) and d:(20gig) hard
drives and reinstalled Windows XP Professional and
subsequent upgrades (except SP1 - I'm having trouble with
that one)

Since doing all that, I cannot find my d: hard drive in
My Computer. When I try to find it with the command
prompt it states that the drive is not ready - it assumes
that my CD Rom drive is now D: (without a disk in it).

However, it does show up as a device in the system folder
in the control panel and it appears to be working
correctly. I've deleted the drivers for it and my system
found the HD and reinstalled the drivers for it. Upon
startup, it also shows up in the BIOS

What am I missing? D: drive is empty and had no system
files on it. I had it working before as a partitioned
disk into two disks. I've since removed the partition
after reformatting

Any advice would be welcome

Thank you
 
If you removed the partition, then it's gone, and windows
has reassigned the drive letter to an available device.
I think the problem is that after formatting you need to
make the partition active, this is why my computer says
it's not ready. I assume you did the reformat with fdisk
rather than XP system disk manager?
 
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