XP does not see new Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hello
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H

Hello

Can anyone offer any help regarding fitting additional new hard drives and
also removable hard drives when using windows XP ?


When my computer used Windows 98se, I never had a problem with removable
drives. All you had to do was select the option in properties saying the
drive was 'Removable' and good old 98se did the rest.

In XP I don't seem to be able to find this option. The result is that if a
drive is pluged in to the drive bay that was not there when XP was in
stalled then it seems that the PC just does not see the drive. This happens
doing a Cold or Hot swap.

Also the fixed drive on IDE channel 2 has just been changed, and you've
guessed it....... XP now does not see the replacement drive.

So...... if someone can tell me what I've done wrong I would be pleased to
hear from you.


Homerun31
 
Try using the Disk Management snap-in. Right-click My Computer, select
Manage. All disks attached to your computer should show up there and some
problems might be solved there.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, but have already tried that (checked again this
morning, just in case.) The other two drives are not shown !

There seems no way to tell XP that a hard drive is removeable. Perhaps it's
supposed to work it out for it's self.

I know that if I leave the drives fitted to the computer and then Re-install
XP then it will find the missing drives, but this seems to be a very over
the top approch to make XP find the drives. Even if I do the re-install,
there will be a problem next time I change one of the drives for a different
one, and the whole process would begin again.

I can't belive that I'm the only person in the world using XP with
removeable hard drives, someone must have an answer I hope.

Please keep offering suggestions, I'm willing to give most ideas a try.

Thanks,

Homerun31
 
I will try to offer further help but I have no experience with this
particular error so please be patient. Just to check basic assumptions: do
you have a desktop or a laptop? How many hard disks are attached and how
(IDE or SCSI or even USB or FireWire)? How is the BIOS configured? Do all
drives show up there?


Andre.
 
Are your new drives formatted correctly, are all jumpers
set correctly, ie: master/slave etc. Does the removable
drives require drivers ? Dont forget that xp is a more
secure operating system and you may have to setup new
hardware manually !
 
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