I have two different hard drives connected to my computer. Both are SATA drives. While both are plugged in, only one is registered under "My Computer" when I open it up. BIOS indicates both are also connected. I was wondering if I had done something wrong when installing windows and thus the other one did not boot up or what the problem could be. Thank you.
Well, do both drives have partitions on them ? Did you look in the disk manager if both appear there ? How about device manager ?
It could be that one of them is not formatted into NTFS or FAT. If the drive is unformatted, I don't think it would show up. Also, do the drives have the same capacity? Could it be they've been put into a RAID 1 automatically or by accident?
Did you just hook them up, or did you choose master/slave, RAID 0, RAID 1, etc?
There is no master or slave setting to choose on SATA drives, AFAIK...
Go check the Disk Manager. Sounds like a problem I experienced a few times with the OS handing out the same letter for two drives, therefore showing only one of them in My Computer. If it's the same thing with yours, all you need to do is change the label for your second hard drive.
Go check the Disk Manager. Sounds like a problem I experienced a few times with the OS handing out the same letter for two drives, therefore showing only one of them in My Computer. If it's the same thing with yours, all you need to do is change the label for your second hard drive.
So long as your aware thats not actually possible then I'm happy... Disk managment like everyone else has said, I'd put my money on it not being initialized for the OS. You can use non-formatted disks if they are initiazlied, first time you write it will format them with default 512k sectors in NTFS.
I prefer FAT32 myself, it is more compatible, if not as robust.
I believe hoelmkjaer's suggestion was worth mentioning. If the drive was formatted (or you didn't reboot), assigning it a drive letter may help. It is also helpful to know you can change D: to F:, etc..
Since we are likely dealing with a factory stock SATA drive, I'd estimate a 99.999% to 100% chance that the drive is not formatted.
I prefer FAT32 myself, it is more compatible, if not as robust.
How do you store large files? lol
I was just dropping a counter-point to your mention of NTFS.
For me, 4gb is plenty. I don't have any files that large. Most are no larger than 200mb, or even 10mb, being mostly MP3s, wallpaper, and troubleshooting tools, and a few ISOs.
Stuff I want to access from more than just WinXP.
[NT OS - NTFS] [Fun Data - FAT32] [Experimental OS - ???] [Stable (old) Linux distribution - Ext3]
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