Hi all,
I have a feeling this is a stupid question but here goes anyway!
I have just installed a new Maxtor 200gig hard drive as the slave on IDE1 which also has a 40gig hd as the master. On IDE 2 i have a DVD ROM and a Pioneer 108. I also have a pci card giving me 2 more Ide channels. Only one is used which contains an 80 gig disk and a 160 gig disk.
In windows XP Pro the computer recognises all but the new Maxtor (slave IDE1).
I go into the bios and the computer recognises it ok but windows doesn't. It is in device manager but it tells me in there it is not initialised.
How do i get it to work?
Mike
right click on my computer
select manage
select storage
select disk management(local)
does the drive appear in there ?
if not , i would suggest it may be better to attach it to the spare connection on the pci card and see if it is recognised there.
if it does , you can then format it from within the management screen / partition it , do whatever and then probably have to reboot which will then give you a new drive ( or partitions ) to use.
you can change their assigned letters from within management too.
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management.
You will find all drives listed there. Right click and select Format.
Check in Device Manager that DMA is on.
I'm not sure if its the same problem, but when I built my new PC Windows XP didn't see my second HD even though the motherboard saw it on booting up. I couldn't see it in Device Manager.
I downloaded a utility from the Maxtor website, Maxblast 4, which found the disc and everything was sorted.
Only difference is that I put both my hard disks on as SATA.
I'm having similar problems with a drive in a caddie. I've scavenged it from a Win98 machine (so it's FAT formatted) and am trying to get it to work in an XP machine (NTFS). The BIOS finds it and Disk Management lists it without a name or drive letter, and it doesn't appear in the map of drives. I now don't know what to do, because right-clicking on the (empty) drive name brings up only "Help", so I can't format it, rename it etc.
Gary's already thinking about this one.
Alan,
I'll say the bleedin' obvious and recommend that you pull the drive from its caddy tray, and connect it directly to the IDE and power within the PC.
If the PC then sees it and lets you format it, then there's a good chance that there's a problem with the caddy.
That said, what you should do before that is ensure:
1/ You've locked the caddy when you have it in the PC
2/ Properly set the drive jumper - to master or slave, depending on the setting of what else is connected to the motherboard on the same IDE cable (if anything).
3/ Checked (inside the caddy) the data and power connections to the drive
4/ Checked the data and power connections to the drive caddy itself.
5/ Checked that the data cable from the motherboard to the outside of the drive-caddy housing is good at the other end, too
If 1-5 are all definitely okay, then do as I suggest and pull out the drive and connect it directly, by-passing the caddy, and see whether XP likes it any better.
Bob C
Alan.
If that scavenged drive is ATA100/133, and the short ATA cable inside the caddie is 40 way ATA33, that's the problem. I expect it worked with a direct connection to the controller, as Bob suggested.
I used to have two caddies on the primary IDE with a Win98 machine. After moving to Win2K then to XP, the drives were very often not found. Even with new ATA133 cables.
I now use a duel boot with one ATA133 caddie on the secondary IDE with a CD writer. I have never had a problem with this set up.
Thanks all.
Gary, as usual problem solved - thanks yet again. I now have completely lost count of how many beers i owe you!
Mike
Bob, all connections are good, so I suspect it's as John suggests. The drives were on a Promise Raid card in the Win98 (450Meg) machine and worked perfectly for 5 years. I'm trying to get them to work on the secondary cable in a Win XP (1.8G) machine, there are already two drives on the primary and the secondary has a cdrw as main on the secondary. I was just trying to use two 25G drives as backups, it seemd like a good idea at the time. Maybe I should get a firewire casing instead.
FWIW, I've not been able to get those drives working in XP. The BIOS finds the drive but Windows doesn't recognise the format. Therefore disk management won't let me format it or name it. Apparently, Diskpart can delete the partition, but I can't work out how to do it. I'm stuck.
I'm not really into XP, but is it viable to use a old boot disk to use fdisk to nudge windows into seeing a drive assignment??
If I knew what that meant, I might try it.
When I had trouble get a new disk recognised I used a windows boot disk (MS-DOS startup disk, Floppy in a: drive, Format,check MS-DOS box) to boot from and used the fdisk facility from the command prompt to create a primary partition on the new drive. What I can't remember is if I was XP at the time,I think I was.
Do be careful with fdisk. As it will show all your drives and allow you to delete partition etc. on all of them.
I don't think I've got a boot floppy, two laptops and a desktop all came installed from cd/dvd.
Woiuld fdisk allow me to delete the sole partition on a disk that has neither name nor drive letter? Because that's the situation I've got (disk taken out of 98 machine, trying to use it in XP machine).
I starting to go beyond my knowledge a bit.
There should be somke more here that might help
It talks of FAT16 and FAT32. Is FAT32 what XP assumes?
Also, it talks of formatting either a Master or Slave drive. The machine I want to do this on already has Master (C) and a Slave (V) on one chain, and a cdrw as Master (D) on the other. The caddie that will hold these "old" drives is the Slave on the second chain. Not sure how all that's going to work, but I'm willing to give it a try.
After you boot the system with the startup disk in drive A:. At the prompt, type FDISK and .
After the FDISK utility starts, the first screen (if using FAT32 version) should ask if you want to use Large Drive support. I can't remember if there is a NTFS option but you can convert the partition later so answer yes to Large Disk support
The screen should show something like this
Current Fixed Disk Drive: 1
Choose one of the following options
1. Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS drive
2. Set Active Partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS drive
4. Display partition information
5. Change current fixed disk drive (Only if more than one drive is present)
Enter Choice [ ]
It automatically give you options for your boot drive
If the operating system is seeing all your drives you would use option 5 to list them. If you can see the new drive then you can select and go on to format it. If it isn't there then Fdisk can't help either.
I found out how to make a boot disk, and made one. On starting up with it in, I got the DOS prompt, no problem. I typed fdisk and got a "bad command" message. Took the disk out and rebooted, then out it back in to have a look at what is on it; it has files for keyboard, ega, and display. Nothing else, zilch.
So, I can't do it that way. And that's the reason why the MS info on fdisk doesn't talk about XP., I guess.
Hmmmm.... It may have been that I used an old win98 boot disk, It's a while ago since I did it.
Fdisk is unique to that version of the o/s.
Anything before windows NT won't know about ntfs.
Win 98se etc will allow fdisking of a FAT32 capable system , which once you installed xp , you could then convert to ntfs.
If all you want to do is fdisk / format an old drive and install xp on it , all you need to do is boot the pc from the xp cdrom and during install tell it to wipe out the disk and start again from scratch.
you get the option when you get to the 'where do you want xp installed ' screen.
My local PC-guru has fixed it. Fdisk isn't part of XP because XP isn't based on DOS. He also told me that Diskpart is diabolically difficult to use (no surprise that I could work out how to use it then). I took the two drives in to him today. He put them into a Win2000 machine, and that proved to be the solution.
The 2000 machine recognised the drives, but said that one was 23.6G and the other was 47.2G. They are both IBM 25G drives, and I'd bought them when 25G was big, and installed them in a Win98 machine, on a Promise Raid card. I'd striped them together to look like a 50G drive for video use. So, the 2000 machine showed us what the problem was, one was telling Windows that it was twice it's size. But at least it tolerated it and showed the partition, CP wouldn't do that at all. It was then trivial to format it, and the other one as well.
I then took them both home and tried again in the XP machine. This time, it found the drives and reported the right size, but formatted FAT32. This time, it was trivial to reformat them both in NTFS.
So, that was the problem, The Promise Raid card had left some info on both, telling it what size they were when used together. That baffled XP. The simple reformatting in the 2000 machine fixed it.
Now I'm happy :D