XP won't detect the hardrive.

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 07:47

I have taken the old 140GB IDE hardrive out of the old pc and I want to put it into this one due to the fact I am running low on space. I have set the jumper to slave, my main Hardrive is a SATA. However when I boot up windows XP Media Centre Edition, I can see my C and D drive from my orignal hardrive, but I cannot see the newly installed one, however when I look on device manager the name of the old hardrive is on the list so XP must be detecting it.

Any idea's on what the problem is?

rpstewart · 13 Jun 2008 at 08:26

Check in Disk Management and see what it says - right click on My Computer and pick Manage, then Disk Management.

You should also set the IDE drive to be master. The fact that there is another HDD in the machine is irrelevant, all the master/slave setting does is control how two IDE drives on the same cable interact.

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 10:21

Ive tried setting the hardrive to master and master with slave and when I do that my pc doesn't even get past the bios loading stage. I looked at the disk manager and it detects my 140GB hardrive with an unkown parition, however the hardrive is not shown with a name like the other one and I have a no longer working distribution of linux on it.. so it maybe that windows cannot read the hardrive because it is EXT3?

rpstewart · 13 Jun 2008 at 10:41

Richard Beer said:
so it maybe that windows cannot read the hardrive because it is EXT3?

That's precisely the problem.

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 11:40

So in other words I need to format it.., but how can I do that if I can't get windows to pick it up or get onto the OS on the hardrive?

PiKe · 13 Jun 2008 at 12:07

Right click on the unknown partition in disc manager and format it?

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 12:32

Ok I deleted the EXT3 partition and now it says unallocated. But it still isnt showing up, should I delete the primary partition as well?

PiKe · 13 Jun 2008 at 13:38

Delete all partitions, but it wont show until you format it via the disc manager.

bledd · 13 Jun 2008 at 13:52

PiKe said:
Delete all partitions, but it wont show until you format it via the disc manager.

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 14:03

Ok, ive deleted all the partitions but I can't see anywhere that lets me format it, it doesnt appear in the big box above with my c, d and back up paritions of my other hardrive.

Amnesia · 13 Jun 2008 at 14:22

partition magic is your friend

bledd · 13 Jun 2008 at 14:59

right click the drive in the left (in disk management), New partition

something like that

Richard Beer · 13 Jun 2008 at 18:18

Just created a new partition on the hardrive and xp now detects it as a 150GB L drive. Thanks for the help!