ewantaylor

Hi

You guys have been very helpful with any problems i have had. thanks to simpswr for help with my boot.ini problem.

When i recently re installed my copy of windows Xp Pro it decided to re letter my C,D,E & F drives to D,E,F & G and when i tried to change the letters back through my computer/manage/disk management i can change all back except the C drive as it is my boot volume. No amount of restarting the system or changing boot priority via BIOS will fix it as the D(ws C drive is the only one with an OS on it).

I also have 2 IDE 40Gb drives in my PC that since the re install are not being recognised in my computer, I did have them recognised in BIOS at one time but no longer. I have seen one of them show up from time to time but this seems to be a random occurance

Any help greatly apreciated

Thanks in advance

Ewan

justpassingby

Hi ewan !

How did you change the c: letter to d: in the first time ? You can't change the volume letter of the system drive (the partition holding the Windows installation). There's this registry hack but using it to change the system drive's volume letter can cause stability issues later on. Best solution is unfortunately to reinstall from scratch.

What's your exact drive layout : which drive is hooked where and with what jumper setting ? Check that the jumpers and cables are set properly : the drive that's at the end of the IDE cable should have its jumper set as master (or sp for "master with slave present" if there's such an option) and the one that's on the middle connector of the IDE cable should have its jumper set as slave.

Try hooking them one at a time as master at the end of the IDE cable and make sure you see them in the BIOS.

ewantaylor

Cool cheers i will try that. I didnt change the drive letter, i powered on after OS reinstall and there was no C and drives started at D. I was fairly sure i had it all sorted out but i will double check and connect individually to resolve the problem :)

will let you know how i get on later

justpassingby

No problem. If you decide to reinstall from scratch your best option to make sure the system drive gets the c: volume letter would be to remove all other drives and leave only the system drive and the CD drive during the installation. You can add the other drives and change the volume letters for them later on.

Tell us more about your drive's layout and motherboard if you have difficulties.

ewantaylor

Hi i have checked the jumper & IDE cadle setting for my 2 40GB IDE drives and they are not regognised in My Computer, though i checked they they were recognised in bios & can see both of them??? i am confused

Also tried the plug on drive in at a time as to get drive letters to change properly & also to see if any further recognition but no joy

Below is my drive set up

Physical drive 1 SATA1
80 GB = 19.5GB D drive(OS drive) & 57.1GB E drive for my docs data, games & programs not needed on OS drive

Physical Drive 2 SATA2
300GB = 84.1GB drive for general data & 195Gb drive also for general data but usually used to store music & movies

Physial Drive 3
40GB IDE drive 'master' - not being recognised my the OS my computer but being recognised my the BIOS

Physial Drive 4
40GB IDE drive 'slave' - not being recognised my the OS my computer but being recognised my the BIOS

motherboard is an ASROCK ALiveNF4G-DVI with 3.5GB ram 2800 1.6gb AMD AM2 proccesor. PCI WI-Fi card also additional PCI USB & serial port card into COM 1 on the motherboard

Hople this helps & any help provided greatly recived

Ewan

justpassingby

Are the drives empty and unpartitioned or did they contain data before you reinstalled ? If there's a "master with slave present" (or SD) jumper setting at the back of the IDE drive that's hooked on the end of the IDE drive you'll have to use that setting.

Right-click my computer => manage => disk management. Do you see them as Disk1 or Disk2 (numbers are not important) in the bottom right part ? If the drives show there and are empty you can right-click => reinitialize them (if needed) and repartition them from there. Don't do that if they contained data.

If you need more help expand the disk management window so that we can see all your drives and take a screenshot of it : press the print screen (or prt scr) key, go to start => run and type mspaint, click edit => paste, save as .jpg and attach the .jpg file to your next post using the manage attachments button (click on post reply or go advanced to see that button).

ewantaylor

of the IDe drives one of them has data on it & the other should be empty & if not the small amount of data can be lost with out any problem :) the jumpers on them are set to Master & slave as required & the master cable join(end) is to the master HD & the slave cable join(middle) is to the slave HD with the system end into the board

I will have a look theough manage/disk management etc to see what i can see :)

ewantaylor

here is the requested screen shot of my disk management area

disk management for drive recognition.JPG

it only shows what i can already see through my computer & not what i can see in bois?????? random & strange

Hope this helps

justpassingby

ASROCK ALiveNF4G-DVI

Ok, so your 2 IDE HDD appear properly in the BIOS but Windows can't see them at all.

Are your CD/DVD drives SATA or IDE ? On what ports are they hooked ?

Check in the BIOS that the IDE controller isn't set to disabled. Reset the CMOS (check the motherboard manual page 18). Try hooking the IDE cable to the other IDE controller. Do you use a 40-wire or 80-wire IDE cable ? Current standard if 80-wire.

Do they appear properly in the BIOS each time you turn the computer on now ? You said it was intermittent before. Check that all the cables are attached properly. Try another IDE cable and other power cables (the molex plugs). Leave only the system drive and the two IDE drives attached and see how it goes.

I'll move you to the hard drive support section and I'll see if someone knows more.

Edit : what's the brand and model of your 40GB drives ? Check the model on the sticker that's on the drive. Have you tried hooking them in another computer ? Have you tested them with the manufacturer's bootable diagnostic CD ?

binaryman10011

did you partition the drives during the os install, if you created a partition, and a second etc, the drive letter is assigned at that point, if you may have created the os partition second, even if you deleted it to create another one, the partition is already assigned a drive letter, so you may have accidentally done this. the best fix, the one that is sure to have the least problems, is backup everything and rebuild windows from scratch.

justpassingby

Thanks for the input binaryman but the drives would appear in the disk management utility even if there were no partitions or if the partitions had no volume letters. In this case XP is not seeing the physical drives at all.

@ ewantaylor : it just occured to my mind that the problem could be with the IDE controller not being installed properly. Did you reinstall all the drivers after you reinstalled XP ? Your motherboard uses an nvidia chipset, please reinstall the nforce drivers package for XP (first link here). You may also want to reinstall the vga and audio drivers but always start with the chipset drivers.

If that didn't work then go to start => run and type devmgmt.msc. Expand ATA/ATAPI IDE controllers and right-click => uninstall everything that's under it. Restart the computer and XP will redetected them automatically.

ewantaylor

Sweet

Cheers guys i will try this and get back to you with detais & info :)