Home Not Recognize Hard Drive

[brommelandc]

I just bought a computer from my school and it came with no hard drives. So copied my files over from my first hard drive, a 30GB Maxtor Drive, formatted it, installed windows home on it and used it in the new computer it worked great (previously had xp pro sp2). I went to install my 80GB seagate drive used for media only (music and dvd's) and the bios recognizes the drive, device manager recognizes it, but does not show up in my computer or disk management, i tried using fdisk out of dos 6.22 and it recognizes it but says the drive is not functioning. Any thoughts on a patch or way to get around this without formatting the drive?

[infiniti25]

Assumptions:

- you have 2 PCs (one from school & current one from home)
- you have 2 hard drives (from home pc)
- you have OS on 30gb hard drive
- you have media on 80gb hard drive

Explain some things such as how old are the drives? a 30gb maxtor would be near 6yrs old now? 80gb maybe 5yrs old?

Providing the names of the manufacturer(s) of the drives will allow people to help you more, I think you should visit your drive manufacturer's homepage and look for their diagnostic tools as I looked at a computer where the bios recognised the drive but it had many errors on the drive due to overheating according to the diagnostic tools I got from maxtor/seagate, think they are called seatools and you load them up at boot time from a cd.

Have you still got access to the files on the 80gb hd when plugged into the machine it came out of? if so maybe its a power issue on the pc from school. Try removing the cdrom and floppy drive power connectors to give the power supply a chance to power the second hard drive.

Hope this helps to start you off.

[brommelandc]

both drives are 5 years old now and i bought the new computer because the old computer completely calved, its not the power supply i have isolated the drive and still does not work, i tried changing power supplies to no avail, and the hard drive worked fine coming out of the old computer, and i have no access to the files on the new computer as i have no way to explore the drive

[infiniti25]

Follow this guys registry changes *CAREFULLY* http://bbs.myunreal.com/showpost.php?p=557...amp;postcount=1

and then follow the "How to Convert a Dynamic Disk to a Basic Disk" section of the microsoft KB309044 article and see if that works

Original response below (I am avoiding a double post)

You may have a problem accessing the content of the drive without the use of another computer or using some bootable environment such as bartPE or a linux boot disk to copy some content over.

Your problem? it might be because of

Dynamic Disks—XP Pro supports dynamic disks; XP Home doesn't.

Source: http://windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm...playTab=Article

Hope this helps you to at least understand why its showing in device manager and not windows disk management.

I will keep looking to see if you can convert it back or what your options might be.

For now I am guessing you could download Gparted or BartPE live cd create a second partition out of the empty space on the 80GB drive and make it a basic fat32 partition and copy content. You might have to do this in multiple stages if you have very little space on it.

1. *move*(not copy) as much content to the 30GB as you can in a live environment such as a ubuntu or bartPE live cd

2a. use a partitioning tool in a live environment such as Gparted or any tool included in the BartPE live cd (not used in a while so dont know its name)

2b. Resize the partition on the 80gb

2c. create a new fat32 or ntfs partition in the new free space

3. *move*(not copy) content to the new partition from the first partition on the 80gb (not the 30GB) either in the live environment or try to in windows to make sure your efforts are working.

4a. resize the first partition on the 80GB drive again

4b. resize the second partition on the 80gb drive

5. *move*(not copy) content to the new partition from the first partition on the 80gb (not the 30GB) either in the live environment or in windows if it worked in step 3.

6. repeat as needed to eradicate the first partition.

I am not 100% sure this will help you get the drive out of Dynamic Disk state as it might not be partition based could be mbr based but its worth trying upto step 3 to start with.

EDIT: just found this microsoft KB article but I doubt it will apply to xp home.

Edited December 4, 2008 by infiniti25

[Ponch]

How "new" is the new computer ? (a year or MHz would be a good indication)