Hard drive problem after reinstall

Hello all,

I just reinstalled windows xp on my main system drive, a 110 gig WD. Before that, I backed up everything i needed on a maxtor sata 300 gig drive. After the reinstall, however, the 300 gig backup drive doesn't come up under my computer. I did not format or partition it, and I can see it under computer management. It is under healthy and active status, and the space used is accurate. The only options that are not grayed out are properties, help, and delete partition. I am not going to delete partition because i have some critical files on that drive.

I looked up on the internet about this issue, and the only thing i found was to install my sata controller driver, but there is no unknown device in device manager. How would I go about installing that if it would help?

Motherboard is MSI K8N Neo Platinum. I downloaded the nforce driver and installed everything but the ide driver, because it has caused problems in the past.

If someone could please help me, they would be my hero.

Thanks

Install the sata controller driver and see if that helps. Usually it's a matter of running a setup then rebooting. It'll replace the driver during booting.

Another thing might be a driveletter issue. Go to the DiskManagement, select your partition and choose "Change driveletter..". It might wanted to use a driveletter that was already in use.

I downloaded a sata driver from msi, but all it had in was a few .inf files. There wasn't a setup.

I cannot access the drive letter option, it is grayed out.

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by nsf003
I cannot access the drive letter option, it is grayed out.

---

Have you tried to do it in SafeMode?

Edit: Forgot something important: Does the Eventlog (probably System) leave any clues? Did you encrypt the drive?

Hi,

I see you are using computer management...................try going into control panel and add/remove hardware and take the add/troubleshoot device option. Try a manual install.

You will need the SATA files handy. :)

A word of warning you MAY (I am not saying WILL) encounter problems with mixed SATA and IDE drives...............a bit like the old problem with SCSI and IDE. Is the 110WD a SATA drive as well?

:)

/me looks up from his oblivion, remembers he's seen this problem before, and asks:

Have you made double sure the jumpers are set correctly on both of the drives?

/me returns to oblivion.

Hey,

I do second |3lack|ce. Many people forget to set driveres to Master or slave. This is more likely to be the problem. Set the new drive to slave, you can check the drive, on how to set it to slave.

Cheers

|3lack|ce

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,

You may have hit on something there? AFAIK all SATA drives come preconfigured as master, and don't have a jumper?

I believe that if you are running PATA and SATA you need an adapter for the PATA and to set its jumper to master.

:)

If the master/slave settings are incorrect the drive shouldn't show up in the device manager. The OP seems to have just reinstalled his OS without any changes in his hardware configuration. So I'm opting for a driver and/or drive letter issue.

Is your OS drive NTFS or FAT32?

The 110 gig is an eide. It is set to master. The sata does not have a jumper to set.

whatthe: Both the system drive and the 300 gig are formatted ntfs.

Thanks for the replies, I'll try it out.

Hi SirDice, that sounds the most likely at this stage.

Here is quite a good article on SATA etc:

http://www.microcenter.com/random_ac...ess.03_04.html

If he doesn't load the SATA drivers it isn't going to do anything?

:)

How would I go about installing my sata controller? There is no entry with a yellow question mark in device manager.

I went into add hardware and couldn't install the controller. Please, explain further.


Thanks for the insight

Try the "add new device option", also you might delete the SATA drive and reboot to see if Windows will recognise it.

Also, what problems were you having with the MSI IDE?

hey nihil

i had a problem when i restarted after installing the ide driver, but i went ahead and tried to do it. It worked. Thanks for the patience, i feel like a fool.

One thing it is doing is showing up under safely remove hardware in the taskbar. Is this some sort of raid setting? I disabled raid in the bios, i want the drive to act like a normal hard drive.


Thanks a lot.

Hi, nsf003

Glad to hear that it is working :)

I do not think that the taskbar thing is an issue. It is not a RAID setting, rather, it is Win XP. Possibly something to do with devices that need to be "dismounted" before they can be safely removed?

It should just function as a normal machine with two drives.

:D

Nihil

I didn't know, i thought the drive shouldn't come up like a removable usb device or raid drive. I thought it was just a local drive that wasn't hot swappable. I'll try to uninstall the raid array.

:cool: