Whee's my HDD?

Here's the equipment: new 80 GB Western Digital 7200rpm HDD as slave, existing 20 GB Seagate 5400rpm HDD as master, P4 2 GHz processor, Win XP Home OS.

When I've connected up all the hardware, and checked the jumper settings on the HDD, the boot-up sequence picks up the presence of the 80GB HDD as slave, with the existing 20 GB HDD as master. It goes through the booting up sequence of Win XP without a problem. When I get to the desktop, and I open up Windows Explorer, there is no presence of the slave HDD. I checked the Device Manager, and it is there. So ... where did it hide???

Any ideas / help will be most appreciated!

 

You would need to asign a letter to itControl tab>admin>computer management>disk management.

 

At present, it is unformatted. If I assign a letter to it, would it then pick it up as being unformatted, and ask me to do so?

 

Type this into RUN: diskmgmt.msc
When your there just format the slave drive.

 

Before it apears as a valid drive it needs to be formatted; from the same disk management you can format.

 

Thanks! I'll try tonight when I get home from work! Will follow up tomorrow with results of my attempt.

Cheers!

 

Welcome to major geeks.

 

Before I connected the Seagate 20GB HDD as the master, I tried connecting the Western Digital 80 GB HDD as the master, and attempted to boot up the PC with the Win XP Home disk. Problem I found, when it got to the stage of installing Win XP files on to the HDD, was that it said it couldn't find the hard drive, even though the BIOS setup picked up the HDD. I thought the setup procedure would be straightforward, in that it finds the HDD and starts the installation process pretty much straight away. I've done this on other PCs before without problem, but on this particular HDD, it is causing me some minor grief. Has the 80 GB capacity got anything to do with my problems?

 

Dude, the 80GB HDD is not Formated yet. Therefore it will not work as master.
You need to set the 20GB HDD as a Master an the 80GB HDD as slave.
When you have completed that process, go to START-RUN-TYPE:diskmgmt.msc
From there you can Format the slave drive and use it.

 

Dude, Where's my HDD?

Thanks Dude! I managed to get the HDD partitioned into 2, and formatted both without any problems. Yes - I forgot that the drive wasn't partitioned before it can be formattet, silly me! However, if I got that 80GB HDD to use as a master, and didn't have any other HDDs, how would I partition it initially? I know that if I used a boot disk (eg. from Win 98) and used fdisk, that would do the trick. But I haven't tried so with Win XP before.