Cannot read two installed hard drives

bubbasmith1

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Sep 21, 2010
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Hello to all.

I have an Athlon 64 3500+, K8 Neo motherboard (I know, old system). I've been using Windows XP for the last few years and for what I do the system has worked well. Unfortunately, two days ago the computer informed me of a config.sys file corruption. So I attempted a reload of the XP platform.

At that time, I had two hard drives installed. The system drive is a WD Caviar Green 500 GB and the other is a WD Caviar Black 1 TB drive. Trying to reload XP to the Caviar Green was a hassle. XP kept reloading and starting over from the install phase. At first I forgot to include the SATA driver so it could read more than the 137 GB, but even after I remembered to include the SATA driver, no success. I tried to install have a dozen times until it finally loaded on a small partition I made on the WD Green. With XP finally loaded, it ran correctly twice before I received the blue screen of death, stating "Unmountable boot drive". Other warnings were 'hard disk configuration problem'.

I purchased yesterday a Seagate Barracuda 500 GB, and I've added it to the system. All three hard drives are SATA.

The XP SP 2 platform loaded on the Seagate without major problem. I can run it without a hassle now, and I can see that Windows recognizes the existence of the two WD drives under the Disk Manager screen, but there is no drive letter assigned to them, it has them listed as healthy and active under Disk Manager, and it does not recognize if either is FAT32 or NTFS. Strangely enough, it does recognize the partitions I made to each WD disk before the reloading of XP. I cannot assign a drive letter to either WD disk on Disk Manager, and I've noticed that on the Windows XP installation screen, if I run it just to see what it recognizes, has the WD Black listed as allocation as FAT, but the WD Green listed as allocation Unknown. Also, I cannot see the WD disks under the My Computer screen under the XP platform, though disk manager does recognize them.

I've loaded the WD Data LifeGuard and it says both drives are intact, with no bad sectors. I'm not sure about that. If I set the Bios to have the WD Green start first, the computer will not reload properly, and if the Windows XP is in the cd drive, it will go to the install section over and over, not fully loading. I have pretty much given up recovering any files on the WD Green, but I am hoping to find a way to recover files on the WD Black. Is there any way to do this, such as getting partition magic or nortion ghost, or should I just wipe them clean? Is there some special WD driver I need to get? They do say on their page that there are no special drivers, but I am just wondering if perhaps some special program would allow them to be read from My Computer screen.
 

John_VanKirk

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Hello,

Couple of basic things to do. First take the CD out of the CD Player, and in the BIOS, set the WD System HDD to boot first.

Then with just the system HDD installed, go to the Control Panel \ Administrative Tools \ Computer Management \ Disk Management.
See if your system Drive is listed as Basic, Disk 0, Online, and that it is assigned the letter C, and is a healthey NTFS file system.

If so, turn off you computer, connect the next HDD, boot up and check it out in Disk Management. It should be listed as Disk 1, Basic, Online. If it does not have a letter assigned, right click and choose "Change Drive Letter & Path" and assign it a Letter, like E. It should be healthy NTFS

Do that to you last drive, and assign it a Letter so it can be recognized.

If there are problems with a drive, it will be listed as Healthy with errors, or Unknown etc.