Hello. I have a somewhat detailed technical question.
I just recently purchased a third hard drive. It is a Western Digital 500 GB SATA (Model # WD5000AAKS). It is the same hard drive that I already have in my system. First, let me describe my system configuration. I computer that uses an nVidia 590 SLI motherboard with Intel Core2 Duo processor. I have 2 hard disks installed and utilize a multi-boot system (when I boot my pc, i pick between either using Windows XP or Windows Vista). One is a 250 GB SATA Seagate which has windows XP pro 64 bit installed on it. My second hard drive is a 500GB Western Digital SATA (see model # above) which has Windows Vista Home premium on it.
I would like to use this hard drive as a data storage drive to use in conjunction with my current configuration, ie, the drive will work with and be able to transfer data from/to this drive if I am eiter on my windows XP operating system or my Windows Vista operating system.
This is what I have done so far: I installed the hardware inside my pc. I booted up windows Vista, went to the drive configuration pannel and added the drive to Z:/ and labeled it “storage”. I just used one partition as the entire hard drive size. I was able to read, write, and explore this drive no problem while I was on my Windows Vista OS. I transfered like 30 GB of data to it….
OK, now, when I restarted and booted up my Windows XP Pro 64 bit OS, the drive was not listed in the windows explorer. In fact, only ONE of the THREE hard drives I have installed were listed and that ONE was the Hard drive that I have XP pro 64 bit installed on.
I went to hardware listings and ALL of my hard drives showed up there and were listed as to have updated drivers and were working ‘correctly’.
I then went to my disk management thing under control pannel -> administrative tools -> computer managment (or something like that). The drives were listed @ the bottom but were in red and labeled “unknown” and were labeled as drives 1 and 2. Drive 1, I determined after booting up my Windows Vista OS and going to disk mngmnt there, is the drive that I have windows vista installed on. Drive 2 is the drive that I am trying to get to be able to be read/write/etc by both of my operating systems. When i right click on it, and choose initiallize, my computer freezes for what seems like forever and fails to initialize. Also, this is the only option I have whnever I right click on the drive……both drives that were in red and labeled ‘unknown’ ALSO show 465GB / 465GB to be unparitioned/unallocated/unknown which I KNOW cant be right as I have vista installed on ‘disk1’ and 30 GB or so of data on ‘disk2’ that I transfered earlier, if you remember.
So that’s where I am. Both my operating systems are updated with all the updates/drivers/etc.
My motherboard can support up to 4 hard drives with SATA so I know thats not the problem and XP seems to ‘read’ that the drives are present ‘ok’ as they are showing up in the drive list……so…..where do I go from here? ANY help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the long msg and I REALLY hope to get this resolved. I am pretty sure this SHOULD work b/c I was able to view my 2nd hard drive (the drive that has windows vista installed on it) from my windows XP configuration before…..not sure what happened since then….