Formatted drive not showing up in My Computer/Explorer

[Isadora]

Yesterday I installed, partitioned and formatted a Seagate 500GB IDE hard drive. For whatever reason XP Home will not show it in My Computer or Explorer, and I'm getting very frustrated. Everything is connected right, the jumpers are right, I've checked the BIOS and everything seems to be right in there too.

Does any one have any idea what is going on here and how I can get Windows to recognize it?

Thanks muchly!

 

[Max-i-mus]

Try going into the Disk Management feature, and see if what it says about your drive..
If it is connected, then it will show... You may for some wierd reason, need to enable the drive before Windows will allow you to use it.. You can check this in the DM section....

 

[nukemaster]

Check disk management to see if it has a driver letter

Hit start then run and type
diskmgmt.msc
Look for the new drive and format it there and give a letter if needed

EDIT....... BEAT TO IT!!!

 

[Isadora]

Thanks for the responses!

It shows up in Disk Management with the drive letters (there's 4 partitions). Strange thing is when I right click on each drive I am able to get into Explorer, and make new files, copy things to and from, etc. But once Explorer is closed, the drives don't show up in there or My Computer.

 

[nukemaster]

Strange. Its normally best to partition within windows anyway. maybe you just just redo them.

Do you have any memory card readers? sometimes those will take the letters away and stop a drive from working in my computer. Try to reassign the drives to different letters

 

[Isadora]

I've redone the partitions within Windows twice already and still no luck. Even tried the program Seagate has. Just tried reassigning the drive letters and none of them are showing up either.

 

[nukemaster]

That is strange.

I have never encounter that before and had 6 drives in my computer for a long time.

 

[royalcrown]

try reformatting it from within the drive management snap in and try 1 partition at 1st, I had the same prob with my wd 640 aaks in vista. Formatted from drive management and it showed up. Also try moving it to another ide cable. does it show in the bios as well ?

 

[Isadora]

Yep, it shows in the BIOS. I've tried moving it to another cable and it still doesn't show. Right now it's the only drive in my system as I used a program from Seagate to copy my old hard drive to this one. Then I used Disk Management to partition and format. The C drive works fine, the other 3 still aren't showing up.

I'm thinking I'm not meant to have more than one partition on this darn thing!

 

[nukemaster]

Partitions should not be an issue. i have drives with 3 and they work fine. Most times i use 2.

Did you also install windows on this new drive?

 

[mike99]

Are you running SP1 or higher? Have you used Tweakui to limit available drive letters?

Mike.

 

[Isadora]

Windows is on the new drive (SP2). But I didn't install it; the Seagate program clones the old hard drive and puts it on the new one. I suppose now I'm going to end up reinstalling Windows, which is something I was hoping I wouldn't have to do. I was happy to find the program that moved everything over and didn't require me to reinstall!!

No I haven't used Tweakui; never heard of it before!

 

[Isadora]

Ok, so just for a lark I decided to try out Tweakui. And guess what? All the drive letters aside from C and D were unchecked! So I checked the letters corresponding to the partitions on my hard drive and they now show up! I'm now in business with no need to reinstall anything.

Thank you all for your help, and thank you Mike for mentioning Tweakui. Who would have thought something as simple as checking a few boxes would sort out my problem!

 

[philnolan3d]

I'm having this exact same problem, but with Win Vista 64 and a 1TB drive. I got all excited when I found his solution until I realized they never made a TweakUI for Vista. I tried Ultimate Windows Tweaker, but it didn't look like that would help anything. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them.