harddrive partition

[Michel Weiss]

I have the same kind of problem as Dave according to his 17/03/04 posting.
I have a two-system installation ie winXP and Win98SE, with a double
boot option when starting, which works apparently without problem.
I bought recently a second 40 GO harddrive, which I installed with the
fdisk anf format Dos programs from a start-up diskette prepared from Win
98 or win XP at the time of installation. There was no problem
I made two partitions on the new HD (in addition to the 5 partitions
on the fist HD).
Now the strange thing is that the 2 new partitions are recognized, and
utilized by Win98, whereas WinXP recognizes only one partition, (of the
correct size, ie approx 20GO)
My question is Is there a tool in winXP to recover the second
partition of the second HD, or should I utilize a 3rd party program,
such as Disk manager or Partition manager ?
Advice and help wellcome !

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Michel.

First, I don't know about Dave and his posting, so your reference to that is
not very helpful. :>( But I am quite familiar with dual-boot systems and
multiple hard drives.

The steps you took should have worked, although WinXP's Disk Management
would have been a better tool for the job.

What does Disk Management tell you about that new hard drive? If you
haven't found Disk Management, type at the Run prompt: diskmgmt.msc. Or
see this page by Seagate:

How to install an additional hard drive using Windows XP Disk Management
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

Drive letters are not assigned permanently; at each reboot, the computer
detects the existing configuration and assigns letters based on its own
algorithm. Then Windows loads and might reassign letters according to its
own algorithm - which is not the same in WinXP as in Win98. Using Device
Manager in Win98 or Disk Management in WinXP, we can specifically assign
letters to most of the volumes and Windows will try to assign the same
letters each time it reboots.

In your case, the drive letters may have been shuffled on reboot. Perhaps
the letter formerly assigned to your CD/DVD drive is now assigned to one of
your HD partitions - but only in WinXP.

Once we know what Disk Management reports for your new HD, we'll have a
better idea what to tell you.

RC