Member Avatar for mopar

I recently installed Windows 2000 and now my Hard Drive light stays on all the time and the system does not recognize my second hard drive.

No physical changes were made to the computer only installed Windows 2000.

Whats up?

Thanks

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Do not let Windows format the disk — that will make recovery much harder. To and following ’s point about drivers/recognition, use a non‑destructive, ordered approach: isolate hardware first, then image the drive, then attempt partition/file recovery. The sequence below keeps writes off the suspect disk and maximizes the chance of safe recovery.

  1. Hardware isolation — power down, swap the data cable and a different molex/SATA power lead, or move the drive to a different IDE channel or another PC. For PATA drives check jumper positions and try the drive as the only device on the cable.
  2. Inspect from a read‑only environment — boot a Linux live CD/USB and check kernel messages and partition tables with dmesg and fdisk -l (replace the device name for your system). This shows whether the drive is physically detected and whether the partition table looks sane.
  3. Make a sector image before any repairs — image the whole drive to a separate disk to preserve the original. Example (replace /dev/sdX and target paths): 
    ddrescue -n /dev/sdX /path/to/backup/drive.img /path/to/backup/drive.log

    Work on the image, not the original disk.

  4. Recover the partition table / files from the image — use TestDisk to search and restore lost partitions; if partitions are damaged, PhotoRec or file‑level recovery tools can extract important files. These tools can often recover data without writing to the original disk.
  5. Check SMART and logs — run smartctl / vendor diagnostics against the drive image or the drive to look for hardware faults; review Windows Event Viewer (System log) for disk errors if you can still boot the OS.

If the data is critical and you’re unsure at any step, stop and consult a professional data‑recovery service rather than running formats or aggressive repairs.

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Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

I am curious if the computer's BIOS properly registers the second hard drive, and am curious if your computer was running something else, like a linux, before turning it into a Win 2000 box. Windows 2K would recognize FAT or FAT32 as a hard drive format, but perhaps if you ran linux on the box, it might be choking on ext2 or something.

It is also possible that the hard drive is suffering from a physical problem. I have yet to run into a normal IDE drive that W2K could not work with.

Consider though:
* Is the drive SCSI? If so, did you install the SCSI driver that the OS might need to work with it?
* Is the drive SATA (Serial ATA?) That is after W2K's time... might need the driver disk.

Does WIndows show you any devices out-of-whack in the Device Manager?

Christian

Member Avatar for mopar

Hello,

I am curious if the computer's BIOS properly registers the second hard drive, and am curious if your computer was running something else, like a linux, before turning it into a Win 2000 box. Windows 2K would recognize FAT or FAT32 as a hard drive format, but perhaps if you ran linux on the box, it might be choking on ext2 or something.

It is also possible that the hard drive is suffering from a physical problem. I have yet to run into a normal IDE drive that W2K could not work with.

Consider though:
* Is the drive SCSI? If so, did you install the SCSI driver that the OS might need to work with it?
* Is the drive SATA (Serial ATA?) That is after W2K's time... might need the driver disk.

Does WIndows show you any devices out-of-whack in the Device Manager?

Christian

Thanks for your response.

Christian,

I was running Windows ME prior to installing Widows 2000. Both Hard Drives were already installed and working fine. They have both been running fine for about six months.

I had bought a USB external Hard Drive for moving data between my son’s computer and my laptop. I could not get the USB connection to work and the Hard Drive supplier suggested that I try the drive on one of my other computers. I tried it on my laptop that was running Windows 2000 and it worked fine. The Drive supplier suggested that I upgrade to Windows XP. I will not do that for two reasons. One, I have numerous old programs that I really like that won’t run with XP and two, I do not want to further contribute to Microsoft’s strangle hold on computer operations.

No changes were made to my computer at all except to install Windows 2000. Now my Hard Drive light stays on solid all of the time and it does not recognize my second hard drive in either the Directory Tree or the “My Computer drives window. It does show it there as un unformatted drive of unknown size and ask if I want to format it. However, I have data on it that I don’t want to loose so I don’t want to do a format and loose that data.

Thanks
Steve

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