Hard disk undetected!! newbie here, help please!!

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I got a new maxtor 160gb HD. Set it to slave, and my old Western digital drive to slave, altering the appropriate jumper settings. Formatted hte new drive and partitioned it too. After installing windows onto my new drive, i found that there is no longer my old drive! Strangely when the PC boots up, it detects it, and i have been into bios too. It is set under primary slave. Whats more baffling is when i goto device manager that the old drive is detected there, however i am not not able to access it, i only have the new hard drive and the partition. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
 
There are two possibilities that come to mind.

1.) You have mistakenly set your jumper settings to 32GB clip or 15 cylinders. Althought his would likely not cause that kind of problem.

2.) Your partition is corrupted, although it works fine when you boot from the drive itself.


It's not uncommon to find this problem... And this is usually caused by a corrupted partition. Unfortunately, scandisk nor chkdsk will fix this kind of error.

If you delete the partition on your old drive and create a new one, you'll probably find it will work again.

What you may want to do is boot from your old hard drive with your old one as master and your new one as slave. Copy your data to the new drive.

Once you feel comfortable you have all the data you need, then turn the system off and set the new one as master and the old one as slave again. From here, you can use a disk utility like 98/Me's FDISK or 2000/XP's Disk Management snap-in to delete the partition and create a new one.

Once you create a new partition and fomat it, I'm pretty confident you'll see your drive in explorer again.
 
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