XP won't recognize a second hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cyndi
  • Start date Start date
C

Cyndi

I'm trying to install a second hard drive. Western
Digital WD2500JD.

The hardware is properly installed, but Explorer and My
Computer refuse to recognize it. Plus, Windows XP won't
let me run Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software
while the hardware is connected and the software (of
course) does me no good while the hardware is NOT
connected.

The Western Digital support site says this is a Windows
XP problem. Any suggestions? Thanks!!!
 
When you say recognize, do you mean you plugged it in and
it's not showing up in my computer? You need to right
click My computer, and go to manage, then disk
management. Your hard drive should show up there, and
from there you can format it. Also make sure you have SP1
installed for drives over 137Gb. Also, the data lifeguard
tools is only meant to be run in DOS from what I
remember...
 
<<<You need to right
click My computer, and go to manage, then disk
management. Your hard drive should show up there, and
from there you can format it. >>>



I've tried that. The hard drive doesn't show up. When I
go to Add Hardware, the hard drive DOES show up, and the
diagnostic indicates it's working properly.

I have XP SP1a. Doesn't make any difference.

Data Lifeguard now has a Windows version, but it won't
work when the hard drive is hooked up.
 
Cyndi said:
I'm trying to install a second hard drive. Western
Digital WD2500JD.

The hardware is properly installed, but Explorer and My
Computer refuse to recognize it. Plus, Windows XP won't
let me run Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software
while the hardware is connected and the software (of
course) does me no good while the hardware is NOT
connected.

The Western Digital support site says this is a Windows
XP problem. Any suggestions? Thanks!!!

WDDL software runs from PCDOS from a floppy and has
nothing to do with windows.
 
WDDL software runs from PCDOS from a floppy and has
nothing to do with windows.


WDDL nonetheless has versions for DOS and for Windows.
Here's what it says on the WD website: "The downloadable
Data Lifeguard Tools now comes in both DOS and Windows
versions and was written specifically for the
installation of Western Digital EIDE hard drives. If your
computer system already has a hard drive installed with
an operating system of Windows 98SE or greater, you
should use the Windows version of Data Lifeguard for best
results."

Now ... back to my problem. I've checked the knowledge
databases at Microsoft and Western Digital. I have
Windows XP SP1a. I've tried editing Windows Registry.
Without WDDL, Windows at least recognizes there's a hard
drive installed, even though it won't acknowledge more
than about 35 gig. WITH WDDL, the hard drive designation
appears in the "Add Hardware" section, but WDDL won't run
and I can't assign a drive letter. I've uninstalled and
reinstalled WDDL, both from the CD that accompanied the
hard drive and by downloading it from the WEstern Digital
site.

There HAS to be some way around this.
 
Hi

Right click My Computer/Manage/Disk management
Double click disk management, a window would open in the right pane
In the lower right pane, can you see Disk 0 and Disk 1
Disk 0 is the master drive and disk 1 is the slave drive
If you can see disk 1, right click on it and select initialize drive, click Apply and OK
After initialized the disk, you can assign a letter to the disk, format and partition to your needs

Pete


----- Cyndi wrote: ----

<<<You need to right
click My computer, and go to manage, then disk
management. Your hard drive should show up there, and
from there you can format it. >>



I've tried that. The hard drive doesn't show up. When I
go to Add Hardware, the hard drive DOES show up, and the
diagnostic indicates it's working properly

I have XP SP1a. Doesn't make any difference

Data Lifeguard now has a Windows version, but it won't
work when the hard drive is hooked up
 
In the lower right pane, can you see Disk 0 and Disk 1?
Disk 0 is the master drive and disk 1 is the slave drive.
If you can see disk 1, right click on it and select
initialize drive, click Apply and OK.


I'm not given the option to initialize. There's a drive
letter assigned. The file system is shown as CDFS.
 
Dunno if this would help, but my experience with WD disks (all two of them)
is that they like cable select rather than being set as master or slave.
This was installations with Maxtor drives.

They were detected in the BIOS, but XP didn't like them.

/Icebiker
 
Hey Cyndi,

I was going over all the threads here, and I was doing some digging in WD's
site about that tool. In this post, this is the first mention that you said
where Windows sees the disk, but only 35gb. Is this correct? If so, that
would only make sense as a FAT32 partition under Win98. Also the fact that
it has a drive letter and shows the CDFS file system bothers me greatly.

As has been stated before, Windows XP SP1 adds support for 48-bit LBA atapi
drives. Here's an article that discusses this in detail for XP.

303013 How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=303013

I would follow it to verify the version of the ATAPI.SYS driver. Also,
exactly what type of EIDE controller is being used? Are you using an
onboard controller from your machine, or one of the Promise PCI cards that
WD recommends?

Let me know these things and we'll go from there. We should be able to
figure this out.

--
Doug Allen, Windows 2000 MCSE
File Systems, Storage, RAID and SAN Support

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