Missing D: drive in WinXP

[Tom]

I have a computer that was originally WinME. It has two
physical drives, 80Gb and 120Gb, both one partition,
originally FAT32 from WinME. I installed WinXP, and it
formatted the primary drive as NTFS. Now the D: drive is
not in My Computer, etc., but it shows up in the
configuration utilities. Drive Manager sees C: as NTFS
and the second drive as FAT32, but no drive letter, and it
states "On-line(Active)". The reassign drive letter
dropdown is gray, and, when clicked, it remains "blurred
out". Can WinXP read/write to two drives with different
formatting or is this my problem (one NTFS, one FAT32)?
Help appreciated!

Tom
dembinski2(leaveout)@yahoo.com

 

[Guest]

WINXP uses only one drive as "boot", you may have to reinstall only to one
drive as the other spanned disk is not NTFS, I believe must have the same
file system NTFS or FAT32 when they boot drives connected, thus span the
other disk when win xp is loaded on one or the other and file system will be
the same

 

[Tom]

Hi, Rho:

As far as I understand it, only my C: drive is "boot". The
other was just set up as data slave. Do ALL drives on a
WinXP Pro system need to be same format?

Tom
dembinski2{takeout}@yahoo.com

 

[Stephen Harris]

Hi, Rho:

As far as I understand it, only my C: drive is "boot". The
other was just set up as data slave. Do ALL drives on a
WinXP Pro system need to be same format?

Tom

NO. NTFS can read fat32 but not the other way.

You should be able to use Windows Explorer to
navigate to the D: drive. But I don't understand:

"I have a computer that was originally WinME. It has two
physical drives, 80Gb and 120Gb, both one partition,
originally FAT32 from WinME."

SH: I didn't think this was possible to have two physical
drives under winme with one partition. That means they
both were seen as C: when using fdisk. I don't think so.

I think you formatted these two disks seperately and
they each read c:\ and then later you installed one drive
as a slave. When fdisk sees those drives, they will show
as two physically separate partitions c: and d: if they
have been installed from scratch on the same machine
which is why I think you added a previously fdisked and
formatted machine at a later date to your existing situation.

I think you have left something out of the explanation.
And I don't think winme is capable of volume spanning.
If I recall from my win2k class correctly, all drives must
be formatted with NTFS for volume spanning and I am
not sure that is even a win xp pro option, but it would
still need all NTFS drives. I don't think you have this situation.

This is what I would try. Assuming your c: drive is NTFS.
Maybe a win 98 boot disk will work. If you can boot from
the floppy and see the second slave disk (fat32) execute
sys d: from the floppy this makes drive D bootable.

Now change your 1st boot device back to cd-rom.
Boot from your xp cd. (it needs to be set to floppy beforehand)

Do not choose Reparir at your first chance, choose new installation.
The new installation will proceed until it finds your currently installed
win xp partition.

At this point, it will offer you the chance to R Repair that installation.
Now, choose yes Repair. You ought not lose any data and this
time your other drive will be detected and I think a boot.ini will
be created allowing you to boot to either drive. NTFS will still
be the default. But now I think your slave fat32 drive will show
up in My Computer and you can navigate their with Windows Explorer.

I'm just not sure that win xp will allow the boot from the fat32
win98 rescue disk. Try it.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Drive Manager sees C: as NTFS
and the second drive as FAT32, but no drive letter, and it
states "On-line(Active)". The reassign drive letter
dropdown is gray, and, when clicked, it remains "blurred
out". Can WinXP read/write to two drives with different
formatting or is this my problem (one NTFS, one FAT32)?
Help appreciated!

XP has no difficulty with a mix of file systems, so it is not that.
While it will not make or Format a FAT 32 partition bigger than 32 GB,
it should have no trouble using one made by something else, provided the
BIOS shows it up as using LBA access.

Are you looking at Disk manager in the graphic lower right that shows
partitions and descriptions? This sounds like a case of 'Healthy -
Unknown partition', which can arise if something has set the 'hidden'
bit in the partition's entry in the drive's partition table. Can be
fixed by a good partition manager. Active means just that if that drive
were to be booted the boot would be this partition

 

[Alex Nichol]

As far as I understand it, only my C: drive is "boot". The
other was just set up as data slave. Do ALL drives on a
WinXP Pro system need to be same format?

No. And I don't know what Rho thinks he is talking about, unless it is
a half baked idea that these are a dynamic drive pair - which as you
converted from Win9x they will not be

 

[Alex Nichol]

NO. NTFS can read fat32 but not the other way.

Wrong. It is the Windows XP system that does the reading . It is NOT
the NTFS drive trying to read the FAT 32, it is XP, that happens to be
on an NTFS partition that can perfectly well read the mix