Can’t see secondary SATA drive in “My Computer”

Not sure if this is the proper forum or not, I recently needed to increase the size of boot (C drive (from 80Gb to 300Gb). I originally had two SATA drives in my PC, an 80 GB (C drive that contained WinXP and a secondary 160 GB (G drive that I was using for data storage. So what I did was to remove the 160 GB drive and install the 300 GB drive in its place, then cloned (using Acronis Disk Image 8.0) my 80 GB drive to the 300 GB drive. Then I replaced the 80 GB drive with the 300 GB drive, and re-installed the 160 GB drive, booted up and everything was good until I went to look for the 160 GB drive in My Computer and it wasn’t there. I looked into the Device Manager and both drives show up fine. All three drives are Seagate SATA, with nothing on the jumper pins (which I think means their using cable select?), and I believe when I was in Device Manager the 300 GB drive was showing up in Location 0, and the 160 GB drive was showing up in Location 1 and the status on both devices was “This device is working properly”. I then re-installed the original 80 GB drive and the 160 showed up again. Can someone please tell me what I need to do to be able to see the 160 drive when the 300 GB drive swapped in again? Thanks!

 

You say the drive can be seen in the Device Manager, can you see the drive in Disk Management ?

 

Sorry, but I haven't had a chance to put the 300 GB drive back in yet to see, but should get a chance on Friday. I'll post back what I find out. Thanks!

 

I had a simular problem. I had a computer that would boot fine from a hard drive as long as it was the primary boot drive. As soon as I put it in as a secondary drive, "My Computer" would not show it. It was listed in the device manager also. So, I booted up off a win98 floppy disk and did an FDISK on it. It showed that the partion was "UNKNOWN". Once I fixed the partion to be FAT32, everything worked just fine.

Hope this helps......

 

homepc...did you lose all the data off your drive when you changed the partion to be FAT32? I've got data on this drive that I'd prefer not to lose.

 

Surprisingly no. I also was afraid of that. I used one of the utilities found on this. I will have to look and see which one I used. I think it displayed the binary of the partition, and gave the option to change it. In fact, I posted a thread here about it.

Subject was "Unknown Partition Type"
Dated 01/06/06

I dont know how to paste a link to it here......

check it out....

 

This thread is about converting a GoBack partition (Type 44) to a normal FAT partition. Since this case is about Windows XP, then there is a good chance it is a NTFS partition (Type 7).

Would recommend to play with Disk Management first.

 

Disk Management did it! All I had to do was go into it and assign a drive letter to the drive I wasn't seeing and it popped up. I still don't understand why it didn't get one when the drive was originally recognized as "New Hardware Found", but it was easy enough to fix. Thanks for all your help!