XP Home not recognising hard drive

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August 18th, 2006, 20:12 PM
MagooUK

XP Home not recognising hard drive

Seems like a bit of a strange one this. I have a hard drive which has WinXP Pro on it's primary partition (200gb hard drive split into 5 roughly equal partitions). I want to install WinXP Home as I have actually bought the software (!), so got an 80gb hard drive, split into 2 partitions, and installed Home on that. All well, no issues.
Now, I want to add the original 200gb hard drive into this new system as it has all my personal stuff on there. Plan would then be to format the drive which currently has XP Pro on it and use the 200gb for storage.
However, the 200gb hard drive is not being recognised in Disk Mgt (and no drives in Explorer) in Xp Home. BIOS recognises it (actually it's the BIOS of the Rocket 133 adapter which the Hard drives are connected to) - Device Mgr has got entries for both hard drives - so it is being seen, but something appears to be clashing and preventing the hard drive from being seen in Disk Mgt. As it's not in Disk Mgt, I can't do anything with it at all.
I have tried booting back to the original XP Pro install and that can see both hard drives fine.
Can anyone suggest a way forward here ?
Much obliged...
August 18th, 2006, 20:30 PM
FastGame

Are both drives the same format ? Fat32 can't see NTFS. asking because you didn't say how they're setup :)
August 18th, 2006, 20:43 PM
MagooUK

Ah - everything is NTFS, except for the second (empty) partition on the 80gb hard drive (ie the HDD XP Home is installed on). That is to say that both OS installs are on NTFS partitions.
Since my original post, I've tried adding a different NTFS formatted drive and both OS's can see it. This one hasn't got an OS installed on it, so maybe that's something to do with it, but still don't know how to move forward with that...
August 18th, 2006, 21:01 PM
FastGame

Are both these drives on the same IDE channel ? jumpers set right on the drives ?
Set both HD's jumpers as CS (cable select) instead of master/slave if they're both on the same IDE cable.
August 18th, 2006, 21:23 PM
MagooUK

Sorry - should have provided that originally...

Have tried both drives on same cable, with jumpers set to Master/Slave and with both as CS.
Have also tried separate cables / IDE channels, again set with Master/Master and with CS.

Am wondering if something is going on due to them being plugged into the IDE adapter - will try banging them into the onboard IDE when I get home (at work at mo). Might also try a repair of the OS with the new drive attached as this drive was not attached when I did the original install.

Don't really see how either would be the cause, but you never know. Still would appreciate any other suggestions if anyone has any ... ?
August 18th, 2006, 22:21 PM
FastGame

Quote:

I have a hard drive which has WinXP Pro on it's primary partition (200gb hard drive split into 5 roughly equal partitions).

Might have something to do with the way this drive is partitioned ???

You could make sure 4 of those 5 partions are extended partitions.

Anyhoo this is what I would do....Boot the XP Pro HD, backup the data and settings you want to keep, move these to the last partition on the drive, delete all the other partions and format so you now only have 2 instead of 5.