Hard Drive recognised by BIOS but not XP!!!

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PompeyRodney

Hello People
Can anyone please help me as I have fitted some extra hard drives and cannot
get XP to recognise one of them. I have tried various configurations of
having this drive as a master and a slave but with no joy. It is recognised
in another PC running Windows 2000/98 but not XP. The drive is good and
TweakUI is not set to not show this particular drive letter. Have tried it
in Win2000 system and it is shown in my computer. If I start the XP PC from
a Partition Magic boot disk the drive is shown as drive 5. When XP starts it
is device 3 for info. Help!! Thanks in advance.
 
What's the Total Gigs in Hard Drives including the one giving you trouble.
Have you installed Winupdate SP1?
 
Hello People
Can anyone please help me as I have fitted some extra hard drives and cannot
get XP to recognise one of them. I have tried various configurations of
having this drive as a master and a slave but with no joy. It is recognised
in another PC running Windows 2000/98 but not XP. The drive is good and
TweakUI is not set to not show this particular drive letter. Have tried it
in Win2000 system and it is shown in my computer. If I start the XP PC from
a Partition Magic boot disk the drive is shown as drive 5. When XP starts it
is device 3 for info. Help!! Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem with a 14Gb Maxtor which could be about 8 years
old. It works fine in Win98SE
In Win XP it is recognised in the Bios but not under disk management
It works ok with all my programs in XP untill I installed Ghost 2003
In Ghost 2003 it won't recognise the drive if I backup/restore from
within windows XP
But it will backup/restore from a Ghost 2003 floppy

I ended up replacing the drive and all is ok now
I suspect that the maxtor was not fully ATA compatible

JF
 
Hi,
XP has a drive size limitation of about 140Gb. Could it
be thatt your drive is larger than than? In such case
updated drivers should be installed on XP, or a hardware
controller should be provided with the drive.

XP should still see it but reports the size wrong, untill
you update the IDE drivers.

Also some HD brand are not compatible as Master/Slave of
each other. Especially under XP. I actually think this is
the issue you are having. I had that before.... not mutch
you can do about it. Maybe rearrange the drives
disposition on the different controller channels, swap
them arround to find a working combination.

Good luck.
 
Once in WindowsXP, right click on My Computer and select Manage.

On the following screen, click on Disk Management.

The drive(s) will now show up on the right hand side of the screen. If
needed, you can partition and format them from here... but the most
important thing.. you must assign them a drive letter.

Cari
www.coribright.com
 
I have a 20 Gig boot drive a 60 gig (in 3 x 20 Gig partitions) as well as an
8 gig and a 13 gig ( not showing ), hope this helps, thanks for responding.
I do not have SP1 incidentally, can't install it if you see what I mean!
 
Cheers Dave that sounds like the most likely explanation to me mate. I have
two removable hard drive caddies each containing two drives. The suspect
drive is an IBM and is in the caddie with another IBM drive (much newer
though). I will change them around but the trouble is I have three IBM
drives so it will be difficult to get around any incompatibility. The total
of my drives is only 131 gigs so I should be ok!!
 
To add to Cari's response, it may also be necessary to enable the drives...
Right click the drive in disk management & choose the Enable option....

Lorne
 
Even if you haven't installed SP1 so you can enable partitions > 137gb, if
the BIOS can see the drive, XP should be able to... Have you tried scanning
for new devices and made sure that the IDE port it's connected to is enabled
in device manager?

Lorne
 
Hi Lorne
The drive does not even show up in Disk Management, it is not seen by XP at
all. I am convinced it is this 127GB limit that is stopping me using it.
Julian
 
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