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Windows ME Not seeing Slave Hard Drive

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by acollins1973

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I have a 4 gig seagate that I run my OS off of. I also have 2 30 gig Hard Drives (western digital caviar and a quantum fireball). Both drives are detected in BIOS (sectors, size, etc.) Yet nither show up in Windows ME under "My Computer".
I havechecked the IDE cables, I have tried various Jumper configurations. I have tried detecting new hardware, etc. BOTH drives worked till approx. 2 months ago as slaves, and were seen under this same OS and on this same machine. I know I have been running the Windows UPDate program. Has Microsoft done something?? I have tried reloading the OS, the OS even scans the drives and finds no errors on them before it loads to the Seagate. I am just at my wits end...HELP!!!!!!!

11 replies

by alpha-male

First, simplify your problem. If your OS drive is working okay, make sure it is jumpered to master and connect your second HD jumpered slave.

Now, boot with a boot disk. Can you see C: and D: drives? If you launch fdisk does it recognize them? Dothey show partitions? If so, boot windows and see if you can recognize your second drive. If not, you may have to reformat it. If you don't see partitions in fdisk, you may need to re-partition the drive then format it.

If this doesn't resolve your problem, let me know what you see using fdisk and format and I'll try to help further.

by b_pope

To be safe use the the MS-Dos prompt in start+accessories to check fdisk type "fdisk_/status" this is simple & safe way to view disks & partitions, _ = space

Have you installed any boot managers, partition or drive image apps, it does sound like a software problem, I'll check the MS site & see if anything comes up there regarding this problem, it seems to be happening a lot lately!!!

by thechas

Yes, you may have a Windows Update problem.

On one of my PCs, Microsoft updated to an incompatable chipset driver.

I would start by updating the IDE bus driver for your motherboard / chipset from the mfgs web site.

If you have a "name-brand" system, start with their site.
If not, and you need to know what chipset is on your motherboard, start with the Motherboard identity tools from www.motherboards.org

Chas

by bobho

Are the drives that are not being seen have any bios utilities running on them (like ezbios etc that allowed older os's view drives larger than what they were spec'd for). If so, remove them (some vendors allowed this without having to fdisk them and loose all of the info). I have had similar incidents like this with ME.

Good Luck,

DrBob:>)

by unixpros

Try this simple well known technique to isolate the problem. Remove the hard drives and set them up in another computer, if they work then the hard drives are fine. If they still do not work then you will have to start entertaining the idea that thehard drives must have gone kaput.

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