XP won't see 2tb hard drive?

[elfwithagun]

So here's my situation. My desktop is an Acer Aspire M5100 that came installed with Vista Home premium. I have two hard drives in the machine: the 300GB hard drive it came with and a 2TB drive I installed later. I'm sick of Vista, and want to wipe the 300 GB drive and install XP SP3.

Here's the problem: When I boot from the XP install disk, XP sees the 300GB drive just fine, but sees the 2tb drive as unpartitioned. I have a ton of data on the 2tb drive that would be a giant pain in the ass to restore.

If I proceed with the install, will XP eventually see the data on the 2tb drive? Or am I stuck with Vista?

 

[Guest]

i honestly can't tell you about XP magically seeing your partion on the 2tb drive. i really would like to suggest you install windows 7, why take a step back in OSs?

i would believe if vista recognized it than W7 will.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Best shot:

1) Remove 2 GB drive from system.
2) Install XP
3) Apply all updates
4) Put drive back in and hope that XP will read it. SP3 supports drives up to 2.2 GiB, so if the drive is fine then a properly-patched XP will be able to read it.

Backups are your friend.