Hard Drive failure - HELP!

[TheMajor]

Maybe the second hard disk is connected to a seperate IDE controller/SATA controller? Installing/updating the drivers may fix the problem.

Check device management if there are any question marks/exclamation marks. If your disk is connected to a seperate IDE controller (eg. PCI card), and there arent's any driver problems, you may still want to try other drivers.

If you are having the same problem on your friends computer, you probably used the same XP disc, and it may be messed up.

You should really be 100% that it has SP1 or SP2, and has 48bit LBA mode enabled, because otherwise disks larger than 137GB (127GiB) will not be detected properly.
If you don't have SP1 or SP2 you can ofcourse enable it using X-Setup, or by Googling on how to do it manually in the register.

You could also try disabling 48bit LBA mode, rebooting, enabling it again. Who knows, maybe it helps.

EDIT: If both disks are on the same cable, try setting both to Cable Select (CS) using the little jumpers on the back of the disks. Also do this if the slave is connected with a CD-ROM device.

 

[brainstrainer]

no, its nothing like that, i dont know the other guy whose friend has had the problem. Ive had the disks working prior to reinstallation so its not a cable thing, and it is detected fine, it just says unallocated space (on several machines too, not just my own).

But thanks a lot for the input

Pete

 

[Redvers]

Yes, disks were fine prior to rebuilding. Problem only occured after reinstalling XP. Exactly the same as above.

 

[TheMajor]

Did you use that XP disc before?

 

[brainstrainer]

yes, same disk ive used on 3 machines for years

 

[bmxfreakrider]

just a simple question...by any chance did you delete the partion on the drive by accident in xp install setup?

 

[brainstrainer]

lol, I'm pretty sure i didnt, i selected the C partition, deleted it, formatted it ntfs and installed windows on it - thats the disk thats still working, if id deleted the wrong partion, windows would have installed on that one, surely, and in any case the other disk is a slave not a master, and therefore I dont think its even an option.

In any case, I wouldnt have accidentally deleted all of the partitions, there were 3 of them.

Pete