Hard Drive location Issues

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brchris

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it seems I have two hard drives fighting each other with fortunately the odd man out. What I mean is that I have three hard drives pluged into my computer but I only see two. The two that are appearing are the two on my primary IDE cable. These have Win98, win2000 and WinXP loaded. Win98 and win2000 are on the first drive and winXp is on the second. Triple boot options wide open.

When I load into winXP (I haven't checked win2000 or win98 yet) my third drive located on the secondary IDE along with my DVD drive loads fine into the driver list, however I don't see an icon for it. I looked in the device manager and sure enough it gets loaded, however the location number for this hard drive is the same as another hard drive. My guess is that it's grabbing whatever came first.

How can I set this hard drive to load in a different location? I actually remember seeing this drive come up the first time I loaded the machine with it. Now, it loads fine, but no icon. Any clues?

Thanks!

note: oh yeah... the win98/win2000 drive is fat32 and the XP and third drive is NTFS. However I see my win98 and win2000 disk with my XP disk so I can't see how having different file structures could be the problem. If so.. then perhaps an article can clue me in.

Thanks!

Chris
 
Have you formatted it yet? (Right click My computer, Click Manage, Click Disk Managment, right click on new drive and click fromat).
 
Well.. switching the jumpers so that the hard drive is master and the DVD drive is slave I now get the opposite effect. That is the hard drive still won't come up but now the Location for my maxtor 17GB and my Maxtor 60GB have the same address. Before it is was my 40GB and 60GB. The commonality here is it seems the two similar drives, that is, both master drives or both slave drive vie for the same location and usually the one that is on the primary IDE cable wins out.

just to give you a run down on what I have I have the following

IDE(0) 17GB HDD; Master
IDE(0) 40GB HDD; Slave
IDE(1) 60GB HDD; Master
IDE(1) DVD-ROM

Does this look correct? Remember I switched the jumper on the 60
GB and DVD-ROM on IDE(1) and got the same issue.

Thanks for the help btw! :grinthumb
 
I believe WinXP has an updated version of NTFS. If you create the partition from XP, I do not belive 2K will be able to read it. It will probably assign it a letter, but once you try to browse it you'll get an error message. Does the 2K Disk Manager show the drive at all ?

as for Win98, it will not see the drive at all since it's in NTFS so you don't even need to try. You can get a third party tool or use Partition Magik to browse the NTFS partition though.
 
not sure if it comes up in windows 2K, however I would still like it to come up in Winxp. Win2K keeps getting a corrupted config/system file. Frustrating, but not the topic at hand.

I looked at Disk Management and the drive is listed as Healthy but it's partition is unknown. It's the only drive where this is listed so I'm wondering if that is it. The drive works, has files on it, and it partitioned properly, so perhaps I am reading the partition wrong. Is there a way to fix this without resorting to reformat. Thanks!
 
Well how did you create the partition on that disk in the first place ?

You can try to boot on the ultimateBootCD & use the Ranish Partition tool & try to fix the partition.
 
Wow..... that was done a long time ago. It's originally partitioned as a primary with NTFS file structure. I was using it when I had Win2000 running and now XP. Since re-adjusting wares on my computer I haven't touched it.

In a nutshell, XP says the disk is fine. According to XP it knows it's there. It's says it's working. I just can access it. :(
 
I think you have two drives with each an active partition on it. With PartMagic convert the active one on that old disk to a logical drive, and your problem may be solved.
 
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