slave hard drive not recognised

[GrahamT]

Hi

Does anyone know why my PC would not be recognising my 2nd hard drive. It used to be fine, then sometimes it would be in explorer etc. but now it doesn't recognise it at all.

I'm running XP Professional. I've also found that when I press F2 on startup and go into setup it doesn't appear there either?

Any help, much appreciated

Graham

 

[homertimpson]

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Click on Disk Management in the left pane.
Over in the right pane, you'll see drives recognized by the OS - is yours there?

It's possible that the drive is on its way out.

Also, I've sometimes had problems with cables 'becoming faulty' for no apparent reason.
Try another IDE cable for starters.

Homer

 

[GrahamT]

no, it's not showing. I'll try changing the cable,

regards

 

[GrahamT]

Also, I didn't mention that I was having problems with startup as well.

I would turn on the PC and it would freeze, then I'd reset it and it would take a good 5 mins to startup (without 2nd Hard drive)
then if I closed down, waited about 5-10secs and switched on again, it would start up normally and showing the 2nd drive.

I'm a novice, so no idea how these are related

 

[Chudley]

The easiest thing to do would be check that the cables to the hard drive are properly pushed in, then replace the cable if not. Failing that, the most likely explanation is the drive is failing I'm afraid. You could try moving the drive to another power & ide/sata cable if you have any spare in there, or even try swapping onto the cable that the working drive is using, to rule out the motherboard being at fault...

 

[alscds]

what memory have you got? if you have 2 sticks in seperate bays then its a well documented problem with xp pro. try taking one of the memory stcks out then reboot. that should stop it from freezing and looping.

 

[Igorian]

what memory have you got? if you have 2 sticks in seperate bays then its a well documented problem with xp pro. try taking one of the memory stcks out then reboot. that should stop it from freezing and looping.

?

 

[breezer]

I have xp pro, and i have 2 hard drives, i have had a similar problem.
on boot up pc wont boot. says drive is wrong / not there.

it was a problem in the BIOS

it decided the boot order should be first device D then C but it would never look at C

so all i did was change the boot order in the BIOS

I have no idea why it does / did it, and about twice a year it will do it again, but as i now know what to do its not been that much of a problem

 

[Spark123]

Hi

Does anyone know why my PC would not be recognising my 2nd hard drive. It used to be fine, then sometimes it would be in explorer etc. but now it doesn't recognise it at all.

I'm running XP Professional. I've also found that when I press F2 on startup and go into setup it doesn't appear there either?

Any help, much appreciated

Graham

Have you tried to detect the drive in bios?
Failing that - might be an idea to try it with a USB - IDE cable (this doesn't need to be detected in bios to work.)

 

[Igorian]

Can you hear or feel if the drive is spinning?

 

[holmslaw]

Have you checked that the drive designation letter is correct.

My pc mysteriously changed the letter on one of my drives, took a couple of seconds to fix, after spending hours looking for all the complicated solutions.