Fresh XP install cant read other drives

[LLXX]

Have you tried booting from a BartPE or DOSNTFS bootdisk to see if the contents of those drives are really as intact as you claim them to be?

[nmX.Memnoch]

Agreed...try that before we press on with the recovery method. I'd recommend BartPE, but NTFSDOS is easier/quicker to setup.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.html

As an aside from the problem you're having now, you can (and should) slipstream the service packs into your XP CD so that SP2 is installed from the get go. See the MSFN guide here (I personally prefer the manual method at the bottom of the page):

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/6/

Use the information on this page to burn your new CD image:

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/8/

[K e n]

Hey I had the exact same thing happen to me just recently...

I have a 120gig drive on my primary master, with a 40gig

as a primary slave, used for projects & downloads..

I dual boot 2000pro & XP pro on the 120 gig drive, I run

norton antivirus 2003 pro on my 2000 system, & avg

free on XP...

When I boot to the 2000 partition I could see the 40 gig slave,

when booted to the XP partition I couldn't see the 40 gig slave..

The 40 gig drive was formatted as fat32 as I also have my main drive

pull out to run a 98se system as well for older business apps, yet

again I couldn't see the 40 gig drive in 98se, i'd run fdisk & it

would say the drive has no partition, or was unallocated...

I figured it had something to do with Norton protecting the files

on the drive, so I installed Norton 2003 on 98se & bingo, I could

see the 40 gig drive on my 98se system...

Now, I don't know what Norton does to make the drive dissappear

yet it did...

[Carquip]

I ran ntfsdos & it found my 2 300gig drives but not my 160gig.

All of a sudden, windows now recognizes the 2 300s, but not the 160gig.

I ran "TestDisk" & it found the 160gig.

[Carquip]

I ran "TestDisk" all the way through & had it re-write the patition table & now everything is back to normal.

Don`t know what happened to the 300gig drives, but they are working now. Didn`t do anything to them. Weird!!!!.

Maybe the IDE controller on my Mobo is acting up?. Time for a new Box I think.

Thanks to all for your help.

[nmX.Memnoch]

Well installing Service Pack 2 definitely helped. You weren't going to get it back at all in WinXP if you hadn't installed the service pack (because WinXP Gold doesn't support 48-bit LBA (drives larger than 137GB)).

Glad you got it fixed.

Edited March 27, 2006 by nmX.Memnoch

[Carquip]

Thank you "Memnoch", yes, that was an oversight on my part in the beginning, not to have a S/P installed. I should no better. But after installing the S/P`s, the drives were still not recognized by Windows. Then, a day or two later two of the drives were OK again with no input from me?????. Nothing recognized the 160gig untill the partition table was re-written. I didn`t alter any of the 3 drives in any way to cause this to happen.

This old machine has been doing some weird things of late, hence the re-install, thinking that Windows was the problem. It now seems to me to be a motherboard problem more than anything else, as I have checked the memory several times with "Memcheck" and others.

The Mobo is a "Gigabyte 7ZX which was replaced four times while under waranty. The Mobo currently installed has been in the machine now for about four years, but has had only 1 Com port for most of it`s life.

The biggest heap of crap I have ever dealt with, even though it`s been stable till now. The earlier boards all failed because of bad bios chips, even though this board has 2.

Seems like a controller prob like you thought in one of your earlier posts. What do you think??.

regards mate.