Second hard drive not showing in My Computer

fistikuffsfistikuffs
edited August 2006 in Hardware
Hi all I hope to God someone can help me.

For the last year or so my system has ran great with two hard drives. Last friday i was rebooting and i got an error message stating " A disk read error has occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart" After some searching i narrowed this down to a NTFS issue. Using the diagnostics tools that came with the drive (SEAGATE Barracuda 160gb) I was able to confirm that the issue was with the file system. Not knowing what to do i set about doing a ZEro Fill on the drive and re-installing XP. I removed the second drive(Hitachi Deskstar 160gb) before installing XP as it is full of music etc and i didn't want to risk losing it.

So XP re-installed fine and then i put the second drive back in the machine and....problems! The drive is recognised in the BIOS no problem. When i booted XP it detected the new drive but thats all. The drive is listed in the device manager as working but the drive isn't listed in My Computer. I tried right clicking My Computer/Manage/Disk Management to see if i could assign a drive letter. The drive is listed on the bottom half of the list as the following: Disk 1(with an exclamation), Dynamic, Foreign. Right Clicking this gives me the following options: import foreign disks, convert to basic disk, properties, and help. The rest of the options are faded.

Can anybody help me to move on from here please? I'm afraid to use the options available as i don't know what they do and i don't want to loose my data. My only other option is to hook up the drive via usb, back up the data and zero fill it and re-install. Surely i can avoid this? Thanks in advance for any help.

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    fistikuffs wrote:
    Hi all I hope to God someone can help me.

    For the last year or so my system has ran great with two hard drives. Last friday i was rebooting and i got an error message stating " A disk read error has occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart" After some searching i narrowed this down to a NTFS issue. Using the diagnostics tools that came with the drive (SEAGATE Barracuda 160gb) I was able to confirm that the issue was with the file system. Not knowing what to do i set about doing a ZEro Fill on the drive and re-installing XP. I removed the second drive(Hitachi Deskstar 160gb) before installing XP as it is full of music etc and i didn't want to risk losing it.

    So XP re-installed fine and then i put the second drive back in the machine and....problems! The drive is recognised in the BIOS no problem. When i booted XP it detected the new drive but thats all. The drive is listed in the device manager as working but the drive isn't listed in My Computer. I tried right clicking My Computer/Manage/Disk Management to see if i could assign a drive letter. The drive is listed on the bottom half of the list as the following: Disk 1(with an exclamation), Dynamic, Foreign. Right Clicking this gives me the following options: import foreign disks, convert to basic disk, properties, and help. The rest of the options are faded.

    Can anybody help me to move on from here please? I'm afraid to use the options available as i don't know what they do and i don't want to loose my data. My only other option is to hook up the drive via usb, back up the data and zero fill it and re-install. Surely i can avoid this? Thanks in advance for any help.

    Import foreign disk. That's all you need to do. Your data will be safe.
  • fistikuffsfistikuffs
    edited August 2006
    OK cheers mate. I had a feeling that it could be that option. I will post back on the outcome. Thanks again.
  • fistikuffsfistikuffs
    edited August 2006
    Yup that worked a treat! Thank you for your help.
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