Hard drives not assigned a letter after clean install

[Guest]

I have a computer with 3 physical hard drives - C,D,E. I had a copy of XP Pro
installed on the C Drive. This installation was slowing down and I decided to
get a larger drive to replace the C Drive. I removed the old C Drive and
replaced it with a 250GB Western Digital drive. I performed a clean install
on the C Drive. When I go to Explorer, only the C Drive shows up. In Disk
Management, all 3 Drives appear with the proper sizing etc. but only the new
drive (C) has a drive letter assigned to it. If I right click on the other
Drives, the only choice available is to Delete Partition.

Is there a trick to getting the old drives recognized in the new install?
Can I take ownership of the old drives in the new install?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

 

[Ron Badour]

Did you format the three partitions after creating them?

 

[Guest]

Ron,

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned in my last post that the hard
drives are formatted and contain data that I used in my old configuration. If
I remove the new hard drive and put the old C Drive back into the computer,
it sees and is able to access these other hard drives.

The clean install knows that the hard drives are there, knows the size of
the drives, knows how much space is used and states that they are healthy.

Essentially the 2 other hard drives contain all data used in the old XP set
up and I should be able see and read them in the new install of XP. Each of
the drives has a single partition on it at the moment

I don't want to delete the partition on each of the other hard drives.

Any further sugeestions?

Thanks.

 

[Andy]

Are the two disks basic?

 

[SlimJim]

I think your idea about ownership could be in the right direction but how do you take ownership of something that explorer cannot see? I have no experience with XPPro so feel free to ignore my sugestion if it is silly.

Perhaps when you put the old drive back in you could set the other two drives as shared and allowing changes to be made and see if they then show up in explorer as "network" drives.

 

[SlimJim]

The following article from microsoft seems to have bearing on this problem - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/867819

 

[Lil' Dave]

Did you attempt to take ownership of the partition of each 2 physical hard
drives in disk management?
Dave

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. Can you tell me how I can do this in disk management?

Thanks again.

 

[Lil' Dave]

Select the properties of the hard drive itself, not the partition. There
should be an option to populate.
Dave

 

[Guest]

Dave,

I right-clicked on the drive itself and it gave me 3 choices - Convert to
Dynamic Disk, Properties and Help.

I chose Properties and a dialogue box appeared with tabs General, Policies,
Volumes and Driver. I could not find any mention of "populate" in any of the
tabs. Am I missing something?

Thanks.

 

[Lil' Dave]

The volumes tab should have an option at the bottom that says "populate".
Dave