Primary Slave Harddrive detection failure.. argg

[RathcoM]

Man, this is getting realllllly annoying.

Alright, i have 2 harddrives, and until now they have been working fine together. I turn on my computer, and i see that windows (xp professional) didn't detect my Primary slave ( G drive ). Ok then, i restart the computer, go into my BIOS and everything is detected and fine there. I reset my bios settings (remove battery, then put battery back in), and still nothing. I tried new ribbon cables for all the drives, swapping them, and nothing worked.

So, to summarize my problem:

Windows doesn't detect my primary slave harddrive, but my BIOS does.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

Edit:

Okay, my new problem. I found out how to fix the detection error. I just run the "add hardware" in control panel, and it just detects a new hard drive installed. However, i have to do this everytime i reboot my computer, which gets very tedious at times.

Thanks for any help.

Edited September 30, 2007 by RathcoM

[jaclaz]

and i see that windows (xp professional) didn't detect my Primary slave

Do you mean that you cannot see anymore the partition(s) on that drive as letter(s) :

( G drive )

Or do you mean that you see in Disk manager just one hard disk (and that in Devicee manager you see just one hard disk connected)?

jaclaz

[RathcoM]

I fixed the issue. Thanks for your help though!

Edit: New issue.

Edited September 30, 2007 by RathcoM

[oldwolf]

I fixed the issue. Thanks for your help though!

OK, spread the news, HOW did you fix it.

Your answer could help someone else.

[RathcoM]

Bump, as issue is not yet fixed.

Thanks for any help

[jaclaz]

It seems more like a Registry problem.

These kind of problems are usually very tricky to find and solve.

What I would do (NO WARRANTIES implied of ANY kind):

1) Backup the Regstry with ERUNT:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

2) Make sure you have a way to restore the backup, second install, a PE, anything, MAKE SURE.

3) Delete ALL hidden devices from Device Manager:

1. Click Start. Click Run. Type cmd and press OK.

2. Type "set DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS=1" (without quotation marks) and press Enter.

3. Type "set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1" (without quotation marks) and Press Enter.

4. Type "start devmgmt.msc" (without quotation marks) and click press Enter.

5. Click View. Click Show hidden devices.

4) Re-boot

if it does not work, try again by:

1) Delete ALL devices from Device Manager, exception made for Mouse, Keyboard, Video card and Screen

2) do the following:

In the command line, type in the following (without the quotes) and press enter after each command:

"cd \windows\inf"

"ren infcache.1 *.old"

"ren oem*.inf *.old"

"del C:\windows\setupapi.log"

"exit"

3) RE-boot

If the above does not work, you still have two choices:

1) Doing a REPAIR install:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

2) Fiddling manually with the Registry (VERY risky)

jaclaz

[RathcoM]

Ok thanks, i will try this out ASAP.

Thanks for your help man. I will let you know if anything has been fixed.

[RathcoM]

Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem.

In device manager, my hard drive is shown as "not connected", but when i do the "add hardware" tool in control panel, the hard drive is installed.

Very weird, but if there is anything else i can do before i reformat/repair windows, it would be appreciated.

[RathcoM]

No help???

[jaclaz]

For the record, the "Repair" procedure is NOT "destructive" as a "re-format/re-install" and it is however worth a try, do read attentively the linked page, though.

jaclaz

[stans4]

Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem.

In device manager, my hard drive is shown as "not connected", but when i do the "add hardware" tool in control panel, the hard drive is installed.

Very weird, but if there is anything else i can do before i reformat/repair windows, it would be appreciated.

It might NOT be your Windows install that's the problem(besides causing it to start with). Check your partition table on the affected drive. This sounds very close to several instances of a problem I've had over the last year or so. The symptom is that Drive Manager knows the thing is there but won't assign a letter to it. First time it happened, it was a 500G hard drive full of off-the-air video captures, I was kind of anxious to get that going again. I've had it happen a couple of times with USB flash drives and once with a USB hard drive. In all cases, the partition type in the partition table got changed to a type beginning with "1", usually "12". A normal NTFS partition is type "07", IIRC, and the leading "1" makes the partition inaccessable to Windows in normal operation. I use a shareware multifunction disk utility to edit the partition table called DFSee, you can get a short-term functional copy from www.dfsee.com. Possession of this will not automatically fix a partition table problem, you have to know something about disk structures or be willing to dig out the information, there are various sites withthat information out there. The utility WILL tell you what type the current partition table is, though. Something to check before you blast your current Windows install. If you've got a partition table problem, you can install Windows all day long without it fixing the problem. Worst part is that Windows alone can't fix this problem. In my case, just editing the partition table type back to normal fixed the problem, no data loss, just a bunch of time the first time it occurred.

The alternative is to blow out the partition table, reformat and restore the drive from backups(which you DO have, right?).

Another function of DFSee is to back up your current partition tables, if something blasts one or more of them it's relatively easy to restore them from the backup. Registered users get support from the author with drive problems, they also get access to a bootable CD image that can be used to revive otherwise unbootable systems.

I don't know why XP changes the partition type on the fly, but it does. The flash drives were dismounted normally, when they were plugged in again, the partition table type had been changed. I've seen nothing int he MSKB about it.

Stan

[spacesurfer]

Yeah, I think it might be with corrupt partition table.

Sometimes, it could be a sign of a bad drive. It happens to me. I bought a Maxtor 300 GB drive. It's a year old. It's giving me problems despite having reformatted. It would be detected and then windows would not detect it. Sometimes, even if windows did detect it, it would disappear. Then, I get this, your partition X needs to be checked for consistency on boot.

There are also bad sectors on it.

Good thing I have 5 year warranty. This thing is being RMA'd.

(Ummmm. I'm also suspicious that dual booting with Vista/XP had to do anything with it. I mean the different is the way they partition the drive. I think I may have formatted with Vista and XP and that causing the conflict in partitions.)

[RathcoM]

Yea, im pretty sure its the drive, because this has never happened before on the same copy of windows. Anywho, I can't wait to get my new western digital (never getting maxtor again...ever).

Thanks for all the help and support.