My PC has 2 hard drives (a Maxtor IDE 40GB and Seagate 250GB) put on the same ide channel. When i boot it up windows xp shows under hardware manager that the model numbers of the disks are Laxtor and RTxxxxxxx. At the same time i could not access both disks (shown as local disk in my comp.)

i tried to recover files from the maxtor disk (which was successful) and hoped formatting it to NTFS would solve any problem (i have also changed several ide cables). But the second time it booted up only the seagate hard disk got recognized. i used chkdsk /f to fix the maxtor drive but chkdsk told me that MFT on this disk is damaged (something like that). i did reformate it but the same prob. keeps showing up.

can anyone tell me whats causing this. it is very annoying. thanks in advance

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windows xp pro sp1
a64 3200+ @ 1gb corsair ddr ram
asus a8nsli[b][/b]

Dont thank me in advance....i might put my cock in your ear.....


put one drive on each IDE channel....if you have to leave out some optical or HDD's to do this....DO IT! that way yu can rule out a HD problem

Also make sure you have yoru Slave/Master jumpers on yoru HDD's set properly.....DOUBLE CHECK THIS!! DO NOT ASSUME YOU DID IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!!! You can't just throw a new HDD in, you need to move jumpers on BOTH HDD's most of the time.

And thanx in advance for the BJ you're giving me later.

thanks anyway

i put the 2 hdd on separate channels( have both cs and pri/slv settings tried) and both bios and windows xp reported that the seagate drive was just fine. but when it came to the other one, maxtor became laxtor and from that windows xp found it difficult to see any file structure. One time i couldnt even format the maxtor hdd and rebooted soon after.

You have a bad drive....you could RMA it if it's still within warranty....but other then that you are kinda screwed