XP won't see my Slave Drive

[PegM_4]

I'm trying to install a second hard drive on my sisters Gateway GT4022 computer. The hard drive is from my dead Gateway GT5220 computer. The motherboard is what died, not the HD. Both drives are Western Digital. Before setting my old drive as slave, I booted into it to back up files I had lost when the motherboard died. It booted into Windows XP with no problems.

I have now used UBCD4Win to (1st - remove the partition and format it to NTFS) (2nd - remove the partition and leave it unallocated) In both instances, it showed up in the BIOS as her original 200GB drive set to Master and my added 250GB drive set to Slave. When I boot into XP, it doesn't show up at all. Nothing in My Computer, or Device Manager or Disk Management.

I didn't know if it would help, but ran Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on it and it showed no problems.

Hoping someone can tell me if there is anything else I can do to get this drive recognized in XP.

Thanks
Peg

 

[Hawkeye22]

You set one drive as master and one as slave. Ok, stupid question here, but they are both connected via the same cable, right? The specs I found don't list how many IDE controllers there are in this system. it doesn't even list if the optical drive is IDE or SATA. The only thing I can think of is to make sure it's an 80 wire IDE cable, not a 40 wire IDE cable. Note that both the 40 and 80 wire IDE cables have 40 pins. Also, make sure that the colored stripe on the IDE ribbon is connected to pin 1 on the drive. Pin 1 should be closest to the drive's power connector.

http://support.gateway.com/s/PC/R/GTModels/1009051/1009051sp3.shtml

 

[PegM_4]

Yes, they are both connected via the same cable. They are IDE drives. The black end connector is connected to the Master HD that is seen. The gray second connector is connected to the Slave drive.The IDE cable is connected correctly.

I found the following info on another site and it matches my cable: Generally, you can tell the new 80-conductor IDE cables from the older IDE cables or SCSI cables because the newer cables are supposed to use the following color coding:

Blue: The blue connector attaches to the host (motherboard or controller).
Gray: The gray connector is in the middle of the cable, and goes to any slave (device 1) drive if present on the channel.
Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used.

Found this info here: http://www.lyberty.com/tech/hard_drives/ultra-ata-100.html

 

[PegM_4]

In trying to set up a partition on the Slave drive using UBCD4Win, it gave the msg. The operation did not complete because the partition or volume is not enabled. To enable the partition or volume, restart the computer.

Since I have restarted the computer several times, I'm hoping this additional information might be of use in figuring it out.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Does the drive show up properly in the bios? I'm assuming it does if you used UBCD to remove partitions.

 

[PegM_4]

Yes, it shows it. I went in last night and saw that it didn't give details on it, but showed all info as 0. I changed the Access Mode from Auto to LBA and it found the info. Still didn't show up in XP. I went back to BIOS and set it back to
Auto and it showed different figures. I saved it with these new figures, but still no luck.

 

[Hawkeye22]

That doesn't sound good. Here are a couple things you might want to try:

1. Instead of master/slave, you can try setting both drives to cable select.

2. Try a different program. Instead of UBCD, try Easeus partition manager and see if you can create a partition and format it as NTFS.

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

 

[PegM_4]

Tried both the "cable select" setting and the Easeus partition manager. Unfortunately, neither worked. Still looking for an answer to this.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Have you tried using diskpart? Can it see the drive? If it can, you can run the clean command on it and see if it helps. Since you said disk management can't see the drive, skip to step2. Other than that, I'm not sure what would prevent it from being seen in disk management.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html

 

[PegM_4]

I will check this out. I needed to give her computer back to her and she lives in a different town. I go there once a month and will try diskpart when I go next. Thank you for trying to help.

Peg