Harddrive, XP, install question

[shata]

hello

I have a quick question a person in my family recently got a new pc and they added their old hd into the computer but then the 2nd hard drive is not accessible but still visible you just cant double click and go into it. How do i fix that?

Thanks for anyone that helps me out

 

[g-paw]

Has the new drive been formatted? Is there a drive letter assigned? If the answer to either is no, go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management, Right Click on the drive and either format or assign a letter

 

[Paperdoc]

"Added the old hard drive..." Was it an EIDE type (also called ATA) connection with a 40-pin wide data conncetor? If so, it must have on it a set of pins with a jumper installed that is used to establish whether the hard disk is a Master or Slave. One ATA channel (one cable from the motherboard) can have two hard drives on it (hence two connectors in the data cable). But only one can be Master, and one Slave. If they started with a new computer that came with an ATA hard disk, guaranteed it was set to Master. Then they took the old hard drive from another machine, and it's a good bet that one also had been set to Master. Plug them both into one machine, you have a problem. You need to set the jumper on the old drive to Slave. That's IF both drives are on one ATA data cable.

If both drives use SATA connections (much smaller flat ribbon connectors), this definitely is NOT the issue. SATA drives always work with each drive on a separate motherboard connector - there is no Master or Slave.

If the two drives are different - new one SATA, and old one ATA, for example - you will need to check in the BIOS setup screens whether both are enabled. If they are, you may need also to check in Windows Disk Management area to verify that both disks are recognized by Windows itself.