Where's my hard drive gone??

  • Thread starter Thread starter julian
  • Start date Start date
J

julian

Just installed a new 160gb hard drive into an Jeantech case and windows
cannot see it at all. The drive is recognised in the BIOS and also in my
other operating system, just not in Windows? I have tried Tweakui to
make sure the next drive letters are not hidden, but all is ok. I would
welcome any thoughts and would be grateful for them, many thanks.
Julian
 
julian said:
Just installed a new 160gb hard drive into an Jeantech case and windows
cannot see it at all. The drive is recognised in the BIOS and also in my
other operating system, just not in Windows? I have tried Tweakui to
make sure the next drive letters are not hidden, but all is ok. I would
welcome any thoughts and would be grateful for them, many thanks.
Julian
Click to expand...

The new drive hard drive needs to be partitioned and formatted. Has
that been done?
 
Ghostrider said:
The new drive hard drive needs to be partitioned and formatted. Has
that been done?
Click to expand...
It has indeed but it is still not even visible in Device Manager or disk
management?
 
If its not visible in Disk Management how did you format it?
& what do you mean by recognised in my other o/s?
Its not perhaps a sata drive with which you need to install sata / raid
drivers?
 
DL said:
If its not visible in Disk Management how did you format it?
& what do you mean by recognised in my other o/s?
Its not perhaps a sata drive with which you need to install sata / raid
drivers?
Click to expand...
What I mean is that my machine is dual boot with Linux as the second OS
and it works fine with that, it is formatted as Ext 3 and was visible
when I installed Linux to it, if that makes sense?
 
julian said:
What I mean is that my machine is dual boot with Linux as the second
OS and it works fine with that, it is formatted as Ext 3 and was
visible when I installed Linux to it, if that makes sense?
Click to expand...

Your best bet is a Linux group, seems you need a driver of some sort.
 
julian said:
What I mean is that my machine is dual boot with Linux as the second OS
and it works fine with that, it is formatted as Ext 3 and was visible
when I installed Linux to it, if that makes sense?
Click to expand...

So what your question really consists of, is:

"What file system is visible from both WinXP and Linux ?"

Out of the box, the answer on the WinXP side is probably FAT32 and NTFS.
On the Linux side, the easiest thing might be FAT32. (I think the live CDs
I've played with, mounted my FAT32 volume for me without me doing anything.
Not that I wanted to even attempt reading the drive that way :-) )

But there are other options which I know nothing about. This product
claims to support EXT2FS in Windows.

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html#acc_ext3 (info on EXT3)

Some background here:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/11506/Windows-Ext23-Filesystem-Driver

"Many people don't know that Microsoft provides an Installable File System
(IFS) SDK kit for writing filesystem drivers. This SDK provides necessary
info for writing a filesystem driver to manage Linux/OSX drives from
Windows 2000, XP or 2003 Server. Stephan Schreiber wrote an Ext2 IFS driver
for Windows which supports Ext2 and Ext3 with read/write operations and
almost everything else available under Linux except access rights,
defraging and some other minor things."

So have a look around and you may find the necessary bits and pieces to mount
the EXT3 device in Windows. Test the Windows access to the EXT3 while there
is no valuable data on there, in case something goes wrong. You might want to
test it for a while, before concluding it is solid. My favorite test, is to
take 1GB sized files, and attempt to fill a volume until it is full. Good
software should handle exception conditions without corrupting things.

Maybe you can post your test results later.

(Original search on "ext3 windows driver", answer was in the first thread I tried)
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&q=ext3+windows+driver
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=13056

Paul
 
So does your mobo manual give any specific requirments for installing win*
on a sata drive controler.
These can include both bios settings and using F6 to install raid controler
drivers early in the winxp installation process
 
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