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I recently installed a slave hard drive (Seagate) The original is a Maxtor. I set the jumpers correctly to be the one with the operating system the master and the new one the slave. After I boot up the computer, the computer recognizes the slave hard drive, but when I go to My Computer, I only see the C drive. I have two CD-ROM drives, and those are not there either. You can only see the A and C drives. I changed the 40-pin cables on both the hard drives and the CD-ROM drives, making sure that the cables are correctly installed (IDE1 for the hard drives and IDE2 for the CD-ROM drives) and still I can't make the drive letters come up on My Computer. What am I doing wrong? I have done this before with success.
You have the two HDDs on the prim IDE and the two CDROMs on the sec IDE?
How were things cabled before?
What is the cable position of the two HDDs?
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Check your cabling just to make sure.
XP won't show the drive letters in Explorer until they are configured in Disk Management,to my understanding.
Was the new drive formatted correctly??
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html
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I have the two HDDs on the primary IDEs, with the end connector to the master and the one towards the middle of the cable to the slave. the same with the two optical drives.
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Hey Lobster Boy,
I went to that link, but i'm not home yet to try that. Now my other question is, why are the optical drive letters missing too?
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I had the same problem. The drive shows up in the BIOS but wouldn't show up in Windows. I tried configuring the drive in Disk Management but it wouldn't do it for some reason. I finally had to reinstall Windows for it to work properly.
Just a thought, but perhaps try installing TweakUI first (http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/tweakui). It allows you to configure which drives show up and which do not along with many other useful things.
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Try changing the way your drives are cabled. Put your HDDs at the end of the cables as masters and your CDROMs in the middle connector as slaves.
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Here we go again!
primary master = HDD w/OS
primary slave = CD or DVD-ROM
2ndary master = CD or DVD burner
2ndary slave = 2nd HDD- Use the master or slave jumpers - do NOT use Cable Select. When doing it this way, it doesn't matter if the slave is on the middle comnnector, or on the end one.
- Use 80-wire IDE cables for both channels.
Note: you may have to get a 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" bay adapter so that the slave HDD can be mounted close enough to the burner for the cable will reach.
Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro
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Well are all of your hard drives partitioned? Im not completely sure what the partitioning command is for windows Xp, It is probably "fdisk" in the commpand prompt (to get there type "cmd" into "start>run"). Your drives must be partitioned before they can be used or even seen in windows
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had a similar problem before. Turned out my DVD-Rom had died on me. If you are certain the cables and jumpers are correct use the process of ellimination. Boot with only primary IDE, then add one CD, then another drive etc.
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Hey Lobster Boy,
I went to that link, but i'm not home yet to try that. Now my other question is, why are the optical drive letters missing too?
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It doesn't matter if D,E,and F are optical or additional HDD's the computer doesn't fail to assign a drive letter based on type.It only interprets information from the controller and connections.
If you follow Jams oft repeated advice,and Arthurs suggestion,then it is a software glitch.Tweak UI is a great utility.
You may want to try to test the new drive by itself from a command prompt with the others uninstalled.First make sure the drive is recognised in the BIOS.Then save the changes.
When you get the A: prompt type in DIR:C If any messages occurr with the response "Invalid" you haven't formatted the disk.
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