Windows not recognising hardrive

[kimpossible]

I had the hardrive from my old PC installed on this PC today. It's recognised in Bios, and is under hardware but it's not showing on My Computer.

Any ideas why this is?

[Tanthalas]

Might not have a valid partition on it, or a drive letter set.

If you're comfy with control panels, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. In there, click on Disk Management on the left.  It'll show all your drives, the partitions on them, and the drive letters assigned.  If the old drive has nothing on it (as in no partition, zip), right click on it and create a new one.

If it has a partition but no drive letter, you can assign one by right clicking on it.

If you're not sure, take a screenshot and post it up here, and we'll take a look.

Edit - woot, 5 seconds before SL.

[slaughteredlamb]

It might be trying to use a drive letter that's already being used by another removable or network device, Windoze is really, really stupid in this respect.

Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Disk Management

You should see your drive listed in here but check what drive letter it is using. If say you have an external card reader or a mapped network drive that is set to D: for example, you may well find that your 'new' drive is trying to use the same letter. If this is the case, simply change the drive letter by right clicking on the drive and selecting Change Drive Letter.

It might also just be that the drive isn't initialised. In Disk Management check the drives status and inititalise it if required and create a partition on it if one isnt present. You can then assign a drive letter to it and that should be it.

HTH

[kimpossible]

Cheers guys, appreciate the help. Here's a screen dump:

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9778/diskmanagehc3.jpg

[Whatever]

Any luck with the dating yet Kim? 

[Tanthalas]

Cheers guys, appreciate the help. Here's a screen dump:

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9778/diskmanagehc3.jpg

Oooh, a dynamic disk.  That's a fancy volume-based system (as opposed to partition based system) that lets you spread a volume across disks, stick oodles of them on a single drive, etc.  Not much experience with them, myself, but if you've nothing on the drive you want saving (and I can't see any volumes there), right click on it and hit "Convert to basic drive."  Once that's done, right click on the bar to the right of it and create a new primary partition, and Bob's your auntie's husband.

If you do need to get stuff back from the drive, I'll wait until someone who knows something about dynamic drives comes along.

[kimpossible]

Any luck with the dating yet Kim? 

Pah! I knew i shouldn't have posted after a few glasses of wine. And no, ....still bloody single   

If you do need to get stuff back from the drive, I'll wait until someone who knows something about dynamic drives comes along.

IIRC it's a 20GB, I've got about 5 years of files, photos and music on there, definitely don't want to lose it.

[Chris H]

A quick glance at the internet reveals that there's a windows disk import utility to deal with instances like this.

However, some say it won't destroy original data, some say it will.

Personally I'd bung a penguin live cd in and copy the data onto your c drive, then do the disk import.

[kimpossible]

A quick glance at the internet reveals that there's a windows disk import utility to deal with instances like this.

However, some say it won't destroy original data, some say it will.

Personally I'd bung a penguin live cd in and copy the data onto your c drive, then do the disk import.

Thanks Chris,

What's a penguin live cd? 

[Tanthalas]

Personally I'd bung a penguin live cd in and copy the data onto your c drive, then do the disk import.

Will a Linux CD support Windows volumes?

Edit - A-ha!

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/dm_status_disk.mspx?mfr=true

There's a guide in there to importing foreign disks - however....

However, you cannot access data on the disk if you are running Windows XP Home Edition. To use the disk on Windows XP Home Edition, you must convert it to a basic disk.

And converting it to a basic disk will wipe the drive.  Are you running XP Home, Kim? If you are, you need someone with XP Pro to get the data off the drive for you.  If you're running Pro, do as that article says for importing the drive, then copy all the info off it onto your other drive (C:\).  Once the imported drive drive (let's call it D:\) is empty, convert D:\ to a basic drive, format it as NTFS/whatever you like, and copy your data back from C:\.

XP Pro in does-something-XP-Home-can't shocker.

If you don't know anyone techy with XP Pro (and the drive isn't full of Kimporn and other personals you don't want out of your sight), I might know someone with XP Pro, a fat set of hard drives and an external HDD caddy.

[Chris H]

What's a penguin live cd? 

Tis a linux cd that works without installing to the hard drive.

Since you've asked that question then maybe not a road to go down!

As Tanty says, find someone running XP Pro who can get the data off, reformat the drive as a fat32 filesystem drive and then bung it back into your own pc.

[kimpossible]

Typical....I'm running XP home!
Probably better to get the home network set up and then just transfer the data across.

Thanks for the help guys.