My brother installed a 2nd hard drive on his computer which, at the time, was running ME. He just upgraded to XP Professional, which is working fine. However, the computer no longer reads the 2nd drive at all.

Is this a familiar issue? Any insight/advice on this?


FYI: He doesn't remember if he installed the 2nd drive as FAT, FAT32 or NTFS.

Navigate and open the following;

c:\WINDOWS\system32\compmgmt.msc (where windows is the root directory name)

Select Disk Management in the mmc window.

Should have disk 0 and disk 1.

disk 0 should be under C:\ drive or any other partition.

disk 1 I imagine would have unallocated space. Right click on this box and select Create Partition.

Any problems, let me know

I went into his comp's disk management last night. It had 3 disks: the C drive, a DVD/CD Combo, and a CD-Rom. Those were the only drives listed. So I should click in the empty space below the last drive and do as you suggested?

Two possibilities:

1. Both drives have the same IDE or SCSI addresses. Change the address jumper on one drive.

2. One hard drive is formatted with FAT 32, as opposed to the new system. If they are sharing the same disk controller, they may need the same formatting.

How would I go about doing that?

Open the PC up.

Check the jumper settings on both

One Should be Master the other should be Slave.

The way your setup is.. I would do this:

On Primary Channel..

HD0 == Master
HD1 == Slave

On Secondary Channel

CDROM0 == Master
CDROM1 == Slave

To change the jumper rmeove the drive and have a look at the back of it.. there are small white caps that cover pins.

The sticker will tell you how they go...

Should look something like this:

: : :
M S CS

M = Master
S = Slave
CS = Cable Select

By setting it cable select it measn it will use the drives in the order nthey are plugged in on the chain.

If you have further problems snap pic of both drives for me and I will adjust the image to how it should be.

Stupid question: Will doing any of this delete any info on either drive?

And independent of your suggestions, will removing the extra drive then reinstalling it delete any of the data on it?

Removing the drive will have no effect on the data.

Just make sure the BOOT drive thats in place now remains the boot drive...

other wise it will try booting off the wrong drive.

Thanks for your help!! I'll let you know the latest.

Hello,

Actually, he should make a backup of the data first. You might also have to re-install applications if the drive letters get re-arranged.

FYI: if you were doing this in linux, it would mess up the partition tables within the OS, and you would have to edit a small text file to get things working again.

Always backup data first.

Christian