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General discussion

Secondary Hard Drive Not Found, but Installed

Aug 29, 2004 3:29PM PDT

Hi,

I have this old Pentium 2 pc w/ 2gb hard drive that is 99.9% full (Maxtor). So I took a secondary Harddrive from another computer (2gb Quantum Bigfoot) and installed in computer and set it as the slave. Upon booting up, both hard drives show up on start up window. But when I go to explorer or try to find or access the 2nd drive, I cannot locate it. I thought it would automatically assign it to D: but my CD is currently given that drive. All I see is the original C: that is just about maxed out. Do I need a driver or something? Is it just not compatible? Thanks in Advance

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Re: Secondary Hard Drive Not Found, but Installed
Aug 29, 2004 7:40PM PDT

I am presuming u are using windows 95/98. You must go to the control panel choose the system tab. then go the device manager which is the second tab after u double click on system. There under hard disk controller u will have the bus master ide controller for your hard disk change the settings for that from default to both channels enabled(this will enable both the primary and secondary channel after which both your hard drives will work.).

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Re: Secondary Hard Drive Not Found, but Installed
Aug 29, 2004 11:34PM PDT

The 2nd Hdd must be formatted. Without a "emergency boot floppy", start in safe mode, choose "command prompt only", type FDISK. and you will see both Hdd's listed. Choose 5 "change drive" to "disk 2" and look at formatting and useage.
You may have to "delete primary partition" OF DRIVE 2 ONLY, and recreate primary DOS partition. Some mobos won't see the last 5-10mb of a HDD that was FDISKed in a PC that sees everything okay.
BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO MESS WITH DISK 1 (C:drive).

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No purpose for making the second disk
Aug 30, 2004 4:00AM PDT

a primary DOS partion. Just make it an extended partiton. Will not matter in this case, but if the first drive had partitons, the slave with a Primary DOS partiton would become the D drive by DOS's scheme of things and the second partiton on the Master would jump to E.