Drive not showing in my computer - drive letter issue - help

Here is the setup -

1-external firewire 300 gig - drive letter =G
2 -an old internal drive 7 gig (used to be drive C - was a backup drive for files) - taken out.
3- Internal 120 gig Drive - running Xp Pro - Drive Letter = F


The old 7 gig drive was removed - and in it's place I put a 300 gig internal drive. I formatted the drive - windows found it in my computer - at like 267 gigs formatted.

I used Acronis to clone the 120 internal - "F"....onto the new 300 gig internal. I then wanted to clear out the 120 to use as my secondary drive for storing files etc.... and run the 300 internal as my main operating system drive. Well, the clone went fine - no errors or problems. I wiped the 300 gig using acronis and it was fine.

I went into the bios - and it sees all 3 drives - and it's set to auto detect. All three drives show properly.

in the boot menu -
the primary option is external - set to disabled (300 gig)
secondary boot option - ide internal - I set to the 300 gig internal
3rd etc - cd option and disabled further.

If I boot in this configuration - the drive boots fine, files seem fine, yet I got into My Computer and it only sees 1 Drive. - "F" - the 300 gig internal.

If I go into device manager - it sees all 3 drives correctly. - No errors. If I go into Disk Management of XP pro - it shows all 3 drives... C,F,G. But it won't show in my computer.

as seen in disk management
F- 300 gig internal
C- 120 gig internal
G- 300 External

If I go into the boot menu of the bios and set it up this way -
primary option is external - set to disabled (300 gig)
secondary boot option - ide internal - I set it to the old original 120 gig "F"
3rd -4th cd etc - disabled.

It boots fine - everything good - shows all 3 drives in my computer. Shows all 3 in disk management, but it's obviously booting off the old 120 drive. It's not running off the new 300. Disk management has labed the drives now as this -

C - 300 gig new
F- 120 original
G-300 external

It's like it's labled whatever boot drive is running "F" - yet it won't show all the drives if I try to boot off the clone (new 300 gig) in my computer. yet they show in disk management fine.

I just want the 300 internal to be the boot device and work properly with all drives showing in my computer. Then I can obviously wipe the 120 clean and use it as storage. I'm not sure what is going on, or what the problem is here.

Help?

 

rleather,

Certainly confusing. See if you can work out what went wrong from here.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

Probably "do not let old-XP see the new partition before cloning".

I'd try Method #3 with your 300 GB drive as the only attached drive.

 

that is a great link - very helpful. I think 1 sounds to be easiest maybe for me. 3 would be good too I guess - but I don't know where this xp floppy is to get into the

.

If I knew how to get to that - or use that, I could try that. Suggestions? I mean, I have a 98 boot floppy to do fdisk etc. I don't have something like that for XP pro.

Help on using option 3 more?

 

rleather,

Just use your Win98 floppy in your WinXP computer. Boot to the floppy and at the A:\ you type fdisk /mbr and press Enter. You see nothing but the A:\ appearing again. Restart and hopefully it's fixed.

Note the spacebar key in fdisk /mbr

Let us know what happens.

 

last but not least - which drive should I be trying this on. Like at boot - does it matter which drive I have set to be the primary boot drive in the bios before I run the boot disk.

Should I be running that set to the old 120 gig, the new 300, or does it matter?

 

You want the 300 GB HD to be the primary HD in your computer. fdisk /mbr only works on the primary HD. It writes a new generic MBR and zeroes the DiskID. So when WinXP reboots it recalculates drive letters.

Don't try to boot from the 120 GB HD again unless it's the only HD present.

 

I really appreciate the help and answers. I'm actually helping someone on this, and I was at a loss on trying to fix it myself.

The sad thing is I won't be able to do this until the weekend of the 7th. I'll update you then - thanks again.