i am running xp pro and i was wondering if it is possible to run 3 hard drives at once. i have 3 installed right now but the third one doesnt show up in windows explorer. but when i look in the device manager it shows all 3? i was just wondering if it is possible to make it work and if it is then i would appreciate any advice on what i can do to have it recognize all 3. Thanks -Nick

I'm running 3 HDDs and a CDRW. Has your bios detected this drive already? and have u formated it? Are you using FAT32 of NTFS file system?

Yes you can have 3 hard drives installed and working.... but ONLY if you are not with more than 1 CD drive (or other device) connected to the IDE 2 cable. By default then PC's can only have 4 units in total attached to the (normally) two IDE slots on the main board. If you have no more than one CD drive, then I suggest that you check the jumper settings on your harddrives, and also the jumper setting on your CD drive. On IDE 1 the harddisk containing your operating system should be attached as "MASTER" and the second harddisk on IDE 1 should be set as "SLAVE". On IDE 2 the third harddisk should be set to "MASTER" and then finally the CD drive should be set to be "slave" (those last two are the SECONDARY SLAVE AND MASTER). If all of this is ok, but still the 3rd disk does not work, then maybe it is an old disk (1995 or earlier) that your mainboard does not fully support.... I had a similar problem with a old 500 MB disk.... Best of luck

* Is the third drive formatted? if no -> format * Is the partition hidden? if yes -> unhide partition (partition magic can do this, not sure about fdisk) * Which filesystem is on it? it sould be fat,fat32 or ntfs hope this gets you any further... Johan

Hi guys, This is similar to the main question, but is subtly different, but may be relevant to others. Assume all answers to previous question accounted for. For some years, I've had a second hard drive of 4.3 GB, sitting in a removable caddy in my Windows 95/98 system. I have just built a new machine with a dual-boot 98/XP combination. I have attempted to add the old second drive, and whilst Win98 will see it and calls it D:, XP refuses to see it and calls one of the existing partitions D: Both are running on FAT32 and so I did not expect this problem. Do you have any idea what I should do to get XP to access the drive, as it has a lot of my documents and art files, which I did'nt want to have to copy over. Regards, KevH

the unaccounted for option is that the drive is simply old and the harware not compatible. see if there are specific updates for the drive type on the manufactureres web site if this is the case and it's not a major brand drive. I've seen drives that systems just wouldn't recognise before. I've also seen device manager report drives as functioning that obviously aren't..

I know windows 98/95 uses a "hidden fat32" filesystem. In other words, the partition is hidden! so you somethimes need to unhide it when aading it to another computer! Johan