Bios recognises 2nd HDD but Windows doesn't

woj101 · 27 September 2007 at 8:00PM

I'm trying to retrieve some files from an old laptop hard drive. I've bought an adaptor so that I can plug it in to my IDE cables and put it in place on my secondary IDE cable as the master (nothing plugged in to the slave)

However, when I turn the computer on I hear the laptop drive start to spin but when Windows (XP SP2) has booted I can't see the drive in My Computer or the Device Manager or anything else. Entering the BIOS I can see that the drive is correctly recognised and identified, so why is it not recognised in Windows?

Any suggestions? Is this a symptom of a duff drive (mmmmm, duff) or do I need to do change some settings somewhere?

Thanks all.

Chippy_Minton · 27 September 2007 at 11:04PM

woj101 wrote: »

I've bought an adaptor so that I can plug it in to my IDE cables and put it in place on my secondary IDE cable as the master (nothing plugged in to the slave)

Is the jumper on the back of the drive set to Master?

Some more ideas:

Have you tried putting it as Slave on the Primary IDE?

If there isn't a jumper on the drive, which connector on the ribbon cable are you using? The middle connector for cable select is slave and the end connector is master.

Was the drive working okay when it was in the laptop?

Maybe the ribbon cable or adapter is duff.

tomsolomon · 27 September 2007 at 11:10PM

Did you get a windows has found new hardware when it started?
If not you have no drivers installed for HD. Go to device manger and scan for hardware changes and see if it picks up the drive from there. If not you may have to install the drivers manualy.

woj101 · 28 September 2007 at 7:15AM

Windows didn't find new hardware, and I've tried a manual search but it doesn't work. There are no jumper settings on the laptop HDD but I have tried it in each position (primary master (for some reason there's no primary slave plug on my ribbon) secondary master and secondary slave) with other devices dis/connected. Still no joy. I will try looking for the drivers on the internet later today.

However, I'm not sure whether the HDD is just duff. I hear it repeatedly start spinning but it never seems to get into full 'whir' mode. It sounds a bit like a CD-rom drive I had once that kept initialising but never getting going. With that I took the top off and found that manually spinning the disc in the right way got it going.

There's nothing vitally important on the drive, so I might just have a tinker.

Cheers all.

Smoggy_Inc · 28 September 2007 at 3:29PM

Hi,

You just need to right click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage' then click on 'Disk Management'

You should see your drive listed, without a drive letter, you need to assign it a drive letter and it should be OK!

Good luck!:j

BritBrat · 28 September 2007 at 4:03PM

Is the old drive FAT32 formated?

And If XP is NTFS it will not see the FAT32.

Bios recognises 2nd HDD but Windows doesn't

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