Had Drive not seen.

**Duchess843** · 2004-12-02 01:52

A second HD was installed today. It shows in device manager, but not Windows Explorer or My Computer. Search can't seem to locate it either. The invisible drive is letter F, my older drive letter is C and it's from this one I boot. F is disk 0 and C is disk 1.

My question is, how do I make F visible in all places? There are no conflicts and both are listed as healthy. I'm confident that I will receive a fix shortly.

**StuartR** · 2004-12-02 04:58

Can you give us a bit more information to help solve your problem...

What operating system are you running? (I guess Windows XP because of the reference to Device Manager)
What happened to drive letters D and E, and how do you know that the new drive should be F?
How many partitions do you have on each disk? Are these Primary? Active? Extended?
What format are your partitions? (FAT, NFTFS, ...), or have you not yet formatted the new one(s)?

StuartR

**bigaldoc** · 2004-12-02 10:18

And while you're answering Stuart's questions, I'd be interested in where this came from:

As far as I know, the boot drive is drive 0. Is it possible that you don't have the (multiple) drives jumpered correctly?

***JoeP517*** · 2004-12-02 15:19

Use TweakUI and make sure that in My Computer | Drives that 'F:' is checked.

Joe

**Duchess843** · 2004-12-02 22:28

Here's the info. you requested in the order they were presented.

Windows XP Home Edition

Drive D is the Samsung CD-ROM drive.

Drive E is the HP CD_RW drive.

Disk Managment (Computer Managemet) list the hard drive as F.

Each drive has only one partition.

This is how Disk Mgmt. reads: Volume: Disk2_ Vol 1 (F) 80 GB File System: NTFS Status: Healthy (System) Capacity: 76.33 GB

Maxtor © 30.75 GB File System: NTFS Status: Healthy (Boot) Capacity: 28.63

Down at the bottom of the window, I see Primary Partition but I don't see which one it refers to. If you need more info. just ask and it shall be given.

**Duchess843** · 2004-12-02 23:11

Doc: I've just replied to Stuart, here's yours.

From the same place I got Suart's information: Disk Management..

This is how my husband explains your question ( I don't understand, I hope you do.

"C disk is currently the boot disk and is the older Maxtor 30GB hard drive.

F disk is the new 80 GB hard drive and jumpered as the Master., while the C disk is the slave.."

**StuartR** · 2004-12-03 07:56

The information you have provided is very helpful. We can see that the hardware is all working fine, and that the disk is formatted etc.

It is definitely unusual to have your second drive jumpered as the master, and the boot drive jumpered as the slave, but I guess it will work so long as the only active partition is on the slave drive.

Do you have any network drives? If so what drive letters do they use?
Have you tried using TweakUI to see if drive F: has been disabled in Explorer?
Can you try to access this drive by saving a document to it from Word, Notepad or whatever - to eliminate Explorer problems from our search.
You could try using Disk Management to change the drive letter from F: to some completely unused drive letter to see what happens.

StuartR

**bigaldoc** · 2004-12-03 09:56

My take is that I would change that jumpering and see what happens. Make the C: drive the master and the new drive (80 gig) the slave.

**Duchess843** · 2004-12-04 21:58

I read what you wrote and a light bulb went off inside my stupid head. I have a program which I paid for named TuneUP Utilities and I discovered that I didn't have all the drives checked (smilar to Tweak UI).. All drives are now visible.

Thank you all for helping me. I really appreciate your help.

**Duchess843** · 2004-12-04 22:53

Stuart, information I've posted will explain why I don't use Tweak UI. In case you haven't seen it, I use a purchased program called Tune Up Utilities 2004 that is better than Tweak UI in my opinion. But I did find the problem fix in Tune Up, it has a drive list like Tweak UI and I hadn't checked the F drive. That has been corrected and I now see all my hard drives in all programs.

For your information here is some info regarding how the drives are jumpered.

Both drives are on the same cable. The 80 GB is jumpered as the Master. The 30 GB is jumpered as the slave.
The 80 GB shows as drive 0 in the Bios. The 30 GB shows as 1. In Disk Manager, they are 0 and 1 respectively, bit 1 is listed as the boot drive.

The only thing remaing now is to figure how to make the computer boot from the largest hard drive. That is no big deal and I can live with the current setup.

**Rebel** · 2004-12-04 23:51

Gloria,
If Drive C is where the operating system is installed, how can the computer possibly boot from Drive F?

**StuartR** · 2004-12-05 09:02

John,

When you configure a multi-boot environment you often boot from a different drive to the one that has Windows installed. The drive you actually boot from only needs to have a boot sector and a very small number of files. Just to confuse things, Microsoft call this the "System drive". The one with the windows folder is called...

... the Boot drive!

StuartR

**Rebel** · 2004-12-05 14:53

Stuart,

Thanks for that information. I assumed from Gloria's earlier posts that this was not a multi-boot system.

A question:
I was under the incorrect impression that the MBR and the OS had to be on the same physical drive. Assuming a non multi-boot system and using the configuration described in this thread (C: as the current boot drive), what would be the procedure be to enable booting from the F: drive? Also, since the F: drive is the faster of the two, would it be advisable to also move the OS to this drive? Thanks Stuart.

**StuartR** · 2004-12-05 19:46

I always prefer to have a single drive as both Boot and System. If you want to boot from a different drive to the one where you installed the operating system then you just need to create an MBR, and then copy the following files to the root of the active partition. NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI

You can find lots more information in Startup Phases for x86-based Systems

StuartR

Edited to add
It would probably be a good idea to boot from the fastest available drive, and make this Drive C: - but this may involve rather more effort than the original poster wants to invest.

**Rebel** · 2004-12-05 20:37

Thank you for the information Stuart.
"but this may involve rather more effort than the original poster wants to invest." I suspect you are correct.

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