Hard Drive Unreadable but recognised

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My 160 gig hard drive is recognised by windows and I can see it on bios it is detected but when I open my computer its not there I cant assign a drive letter to it or anything I cant access it. I have windows xp sp2 with Western digital HD's and yes I've checked all the connectors and tried new connectors. can any one plz help me
 
try right click on the device in hardware see if you can access and config it there
I know it's not a seagate ,but download the seagate discwizard tool maybe it will id and format it for you
I use it for all my hdd startups
 
I'm concerned that Disk Management reports a 120G WD as a 40G and a 160 is reported as an 80G...

patio. :cool:
 
patio said:
I'm concerned that Disk Management reports a 120G WD as a 40G and a 160 is reported as an 80G...

patio. :cool:
I can only see the first drive, but it is reporting OK at 111GB. You might have the above confused with Window's reporting the partition sizes instead of the total drive capacity.

You set the jumpers properly? If you know you did, double check anyway. If the drive is alone on a cable, set it to master. If it is connected to another drive was working previously, set it to slave. If that doesn't work, try cable select.

Another possibility is there's a bug where Windows XP canot support drivers larger than 132GB. Just a total guess (and an unlikely one at that), but I'd recommend upgrading to service pack 2 if you haven't already. If you have, then you can ignore this.

Provided everything is connected properly, there's not much else that could keep it from showing up. I'd try taking it back and getting another drive... It certainly woudn't be the first bad, brand new drive I've seen. :dead:
 
VIA or memory the culprit?

I have a similar problem. My BIOS sees the HDD most of the times (?) but win xp fails to.
I have tried with 3 diff HDD and getting the same result.
My HDD's are Samsung and Seagate 40, 60 & 80 GB, all different so it can't be HDD problem.
On cold boot the problem seems worse because on the second boot I normally get them working.
BUT
I can only have my HDD on the same cable, my motherboard won't accept any other config. and I mean any other. I have a read and a read/write cd-rom drive.
Jumpers and cables have been replaced and changed, no luck.

My motherboard is a PCCHIPS M925G with VIA controller and according to one (1) message on another board this could be the problem as VIA tends to stress with multiple HDD.
AND
I later found out that my 512 MB DDR ram isn't 266/200 as the mobo preferres but 333 ! (3200).....

Recovering data: I have tried (sigh) a lot of progs and the best if you have a working win is Zero assumption which is both fast and sees everything even after formatting from FAT to NTFS brilliant prog.
In DOS the best is Active uneraser but it's slower and not as userfriendly....

Valdeviking
 
so to verify
the drive images above are the first drive
your problem is the 2nd drive
did you try the seagate tool yet ?
and I can't stress enough do a MB bios upgrade if you can't get this to work
after the upgrade go into bios set to optimum defaults
 
yeap its weird cause i tried creating a new partition and restarted it and still not there and i also tried the Western digital diagnostic tool and it asked me to set it up and i did and nothing.

I also runned the hard drive test and it passed it all no errors. WTF?
 
this thing is weird like if i take off my 160gig my 120gig wont work and wont even show on the bios but when i put it back in it works loads up windows.
 
just a thought is the drives hooked up in the right master slave order, are they both set as master or both as slave
 
swker98 said:
just a thought is the drives hooked up in the right master slave order, are they both set as master or both as slave

Umm the 120gig is set on master and and the 160gig on slave and now i have the problem of windows telling me that the 160gig is C:drive
 
angelos619 said:
Umm the 120gig is set on master and and the 160gig on slave and now i have the problem of windows telling me that the 160gig is C:drive

Have you tried booting into Windows yet? Only the drive with an active partition should boot. You may also be able to specify the boot order in the BIOS as to which drive boots first in case there is an issue. Windows should make the active partition C: and then assign (or not assign) a drive letter to your 160GB.

If there's no data on the 160GB and you cannot boot your computer up, use the partition manager near the beginning of the Windows XP setup to delete all the partitions on the 160GB and recreate them. This will force Windows to assign different letters.
 
Rick said:
If there's no data on the 160GB and you cannot boot your computer up, use the partition manager near the beginning of the Windows XP setup to delete all the partitions on the 160GB and recreate them. This will force Windows to assign different letters.

Yeap tried that and it does show the 160gig but its says drive not accessible i cant even select it, i cant delete the partition because it wont let me select it.

I think the problem is that the 160gig HD thinks its Master also and it also tries to act as C: drive thats what i think.
 
Leave the 120G as master on IDE1...
Hook up the 160G by itself as master on IDE2...
Then run the WD setup utility to prep that drive and format it for use...

patio. :cool:
 
patio said:
Leave the 120G as master on IDE1...
Hook up the 160G by itself as master on IDE2...
Then run the WD setup utility to prep that drive and format it for use...

patio. :cool:


yeap tried it and nothing i tried reinstalling windows and still the same didn't fix anything. I also tried to install windows on the 160gig and it just said Setup cannot access this disc
 
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