Unable to access 2nd hard drive

hammy · #1 04-24-2003, 09:09 AM

I've just installed XP Pro and have a problem that I think should be easy to remedy but I don't know how!! I have two 40gb Maxtor hard drives, both are formatted as NTFS. The first hard drive is my system drive. XP installed properly and I have downloaded and installed SP1. My 2nd hard drive is visible on my boot screen and in my BIOS screen. It is also visible in my hardware list under my computer. When I go into disk administration both hard drives are visible. My system drive is labelled as drive"C". However, the 2nd drive has no letter assigned to it and it is not visible in windows explorer. I can't access the drive at all. When I try to assign a letter to it by right clicking it in disk administration the "change drive letter" option is not available. Everywhere I check says the drive is good and is working correctly. I know the drive is good because I have been using it for a year. By the way, the system is a P4 and an Abit motherboard. I use this computer as a digital recording studio.
Any suggestions???
Please let me know if you need anymore information.
Thanks!!!
John

pinoyskull · #2 04-24-2003, 09:49 AM

maybe your second harddrive is not formatted... if not, format it first before you can access it

hammy · #3 04-24-2003, 09:56 AM

the hard drive is already formatted as a NTFS drive and has data on it...

Robbie187 · #4 05-03-2005, 10:08 PM

I am having the same problem on my computer... If you or anybody else can explain what is happening I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hammy

the hard drive is already formatted as a NTFS drive and has data on it...

Ant · #5 05-04-2005, 01:38 AM

Make sure the master drive is attached to the last connector on the ribbon cable and that the jumper switch is set to MASTER (WITH SLAVE if available) on the Master and (SLAVE) on the slave.

Does the second drive also have XP (or other OS) installed?

deege · #6 05-23-2005, 09:47 PM

I am also having same prob, seems like quite a common prob with no solution!, my 2nd hdd was working perfectly until I reinstalled xp after having download probs and unable to fix. Drive is acknowledged in BIOS and in disk management as online ,healthy, active...but no drive letter assigned and all options except 'delete partition' are greyed out, I do not want to repartition drive as I have 50 gig of data on it, I have uninstalled and reinstalled drive, I've had jumpers as master and slave and as cable select and still no joy, in another forum someone solved this prob by disabling S.M.A.R.T in BIOS, but in my BIOS I dont have option to disable and dont know any other way of disabling SMART except thru BIOS. This is truly frustrating, and the answer is probably so simple if I only KNEW WHAT IT WAS!!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Dee.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robbie187

I am having the same problem on my computer... If you or anybody else can explain what is happening I would appreciate it. Thanks.

antflies · #7 08-09-2005, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by deege

I am also having same prob, seems like quite a common prob with no solution!, my 2nd hdd was working perfectly until I reinstalled xp after having download probs and unable to fix. Drive is acknowledged in BIOS and in disk management as online ,healthy, active...but no drive letter assigned and all options except 'delete partition' are greyed out, I do not want to repartition drive as I have 50 gig of data on it, I have uninstalled and reinstalled drive, I've had jumpers as master and slave and as cable select and still no joy, in another forum someone solved this prob by disabling S.M.A.R.T in BIOS, but in my BIOS I dont have option to disable and dont know any other way of disabling SMART except thru BIOS. This is truly frustrating, and the answer is probably so simple if I only KNEW WHAT IT WAS!!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Dee.

Did anyone resolve this problem? Disabling of SMART did not work for me.

oddsocks · #8 09-15-2005, 05:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by deege

I am also having same prob, seems like quite a common prob with no solution!, my 2nd hdd was working perfectly until I reinstalled xp after having download probs and unable to fix. Drive is acknowledged in BIOS and in disk management as online ,healthy, active...but no drive letter assigned and all options except 'delete partition' are greyed out, I do not want to repartition drive as I have 50 gig of data on it, I have uninstalled and reinstalled drive, I've had jumpers as master and slave and as cable select and still no joy, in another forum someone solved this prob by disabling S.M.A.R.T in BIOS, but in my BIOS I dont have option to disable and dont know any other way of disabling SMART except thru BIOS. This is truly frustrating, and the answer is probably so simple if I only KNEW WHAT IT WAS!!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Dee.

I don't know if this is relevant to XP but I had a similar problem on a win 2K server recently (I was acting as remote hands for the admin). When you are in the windows disk management tool, select the area to the left of the disk info and right mouse click - if it says 'write signature' do it - then in the normal window it will let you add parititions and it will have assigned a drive letter. No guarentees re data loss- when I did it I had a known clean formatted disk with no data, and windows just declared it as a single aprtition with no drive letter

blazin42086 · #9 10-08-2005, 01:17 AM

I had the same prob and the only way i could use the 2nd HD was to create a new partition, all my data was lost, but the drive works now

art · #10 10-08-2005, 06:41 AM

I have just added a 300gb 2nd hard drive to my pc. I reinstall xp pro when my pc gets all messed up so I don't want to come across this problem as I will be storing data on this slave drive.

Would this work?
unplug pc from mains then open pc up and dissconnect the slave drive.
plug back in and reinstall winxp (pro) once installed and running unplug everything and re connect the slave.
I know this is not a solution, but it may work..

just a thought.... if there is a sure answer to this please let us all know...

bctimber · #11 10-25-2005, 05:44 PM

Greetings ...

If you can see the drive, but not access it, then try this:

right click on "my computer"
click on manage
click on disk management
right click on the drive (in the lower right quadrant window) and select "import volume" (or something similar to that)
This will add an existing drive to the stack

... I had the same issue with my raid set, and this worked!

Good luck!

tom.

quinzComputer · #12 02-09-2006, 09:19 PM

Sorry to dig up a very old thread, but I had to report that you indeed must format the drive. just finished a new rig (Primary drive a raptor with WinXP Pro; a Hitachi 250GB for storage), and could not see the Hitachi in My Computer.

Do as bctimber writes......You'll need to format the drive.

Thanks!

kingpho · #13 03-04-2006, 12:03 AM

It is a bit tricky but you're able to gain the letter assignment back to a HDD without having to reformat or loose data.

You have to use a tool called dskprobe.exe from WinXP. Other OS's have it as well, I think.

It is a very similar process to converting a drive from Dynamic back to BASIC.

Follow this guidelines:

http://thelazyadmin.net/index.php?/a...sic-Disks.html

Whatever you see in the 42 sector (in my case I saw 44 and B5 next to it), I changed it to 07 and FE. I flushed the current changed and after every was set and done, I re-boot the computer. BAM, my drive showed up and no data was lost.

This is very dangerous, but I figure, the only other alternative is to format the drive anyways, so what do I have to loose?

Hope this helps.

spyrospyn · #14 07-27-2006, 09:07 PM

Okay, I was having the same problem and fixed it very easily: tried to move a good hard drive from an older Win2000 computer system to a new WinXP computer system as a second slave drive. WinXP would show the drive in Disk Manager as healthy and labeled "Local Disk" but did not show a drive letter or let me open the drive or give the option to assign or change the drive letter.

On another thread from some other site, someone mentioned Norton GoBack and how removing that from the second slave drive and then adding it to the new system as slave drive caused the problem to go away.

I connected the old drive as the master in my newer system and booted in Win2000 safe mode. I did not take any chances with the very disappointing Norton software and removed all Norton software from the drive (system works, internet security, password manager). I then connected the drive as a secondary slave and rebooted with the WinXP and the second hard drive was accessible in Windows Explorer without the need for any use of Disk Manager.

I hope this helps. If you had GoBack on the old drive, that may have been the problem.

dwells50 · #15 04-18-2007, 08:14 PM

I've searched and tinkered for hours trying to get Vista to see my slave drive, and then I found this thread. Norton GoBack was the problem (the slave drive had my old XP install on it, with all my other stuff) Thanks!!!