Hi,

As my old hard disk (Maxtor 40Gb) has nearly run out of space, I recently got a new hard disk (Western Digital 80Gb).

I installed winXP/SP2 on the new hard disk and set it as a master, I therefore set the old one slave (this one also has winXP). When I opened Explorer, what I found there is C (local disk, ie. my new hard disk), E (my DVD drive set as secondary master) and F (my CD drive set as secondary slave). I can't find my old hard disk that I expect it to be D or something. I checked BIOS and there I got both of them (ie. the old and new hard disks are recognized).
Could anybody tell me what went wrong?

Thanks very much,

sabas

What file system is your new XP load, and what file system is the old disk drive?

Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

Go to the Disk Manager and see if it's recognized there. If it is, try setting/changing the drive address.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

all the cables are connected correctly? use the Y shape IDE cable. and connect them to IDE port 1. it happened to me before. i had 2 HDs, 1 master and 1 slave. master connected to IDE 1 and slave connected to IDE 2. the slave drive didnt show up. after i used the 3 heads IDE cable, it worked fine.

Hi Jen,

The file system is irrelevant in this case, since XP has the ability to read both FAT & NTFS.

I suggest you try ham30's suggestion and see how XP's disk management console enumerates all the disks - before you do anything else, a little caution can help ensure the data on the missing disk remains intact & accessible.

yeah I think this problem has nothing to do with file system.
I did try Disk Management but I didn't find anything else other than C (my new hard disk), E (DVD) and F (CD). If I found it, I could have assigned it a drive letter.

I swapped these two drivers (ie. the old drive is now master and the new one slave). The old one now appears as C but I didn't find the new one.

One thing I should let you know, I used MagicPartion to partition the old hard disk, so C is the physical drive and D is the logical drive. Does this partition cause the problem?

To install winXP and all other programs, I used Norton Ghost 2003 to copy C from the old hard disk to the new one. Something wrong here?

I think all the cables are connected correctly. Anyway, I'll try joejoe's suggestion and see how it goes.

Thank you guys,

sabas

Dabas, XP sometimes loses drives. I've never seen a definite fix for. But one person said he used 'Partition Doctor' and it fixed the problem.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!