I have been building a computer up from parts donated.
I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.
Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.
I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.
The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the question is, "Where has my drive gone".
Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount -t /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or do tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check, make install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and format... In case you get stuck, have another net connected PC standing by to spend the rest of your life googling arcane error messages that apply specially to one distribution and release and not the next.
Or just boot from the Gparted live CDand tell it how you want the HD partitioned and formatted. That's what I do. To quote a certain meerkat:- "Seemples"
OK I was being a bit facetious with the linux skit there.
But still, when adding a new or alien drive to an operating system, tools like like disk administrator/manager, fdisk or gparted are necessary to manage partitioning. Of course the user may elect to use the entire space as one big volume clump, and skip the gory details.
But on Windows, and for lazy user convenience, most USB hard drives come pre-formatted (think back to the early day supply of pre-formatted DOS floppy discs) with FATx or NTFS and these users never visit the partitioning tools, as above.
So they are just not that familiar with 'installation tech level tools' when it comes to installing bare drives. The OPs query is one that is quite common IME, above the lower level ones of SATA mode, jumpers, 4k block firmware etc...
Drive letters in Windows remain and royally screw up software installs if partitions have to be moved. In linux there are device entries. kind of like drive letters, that point to partitions (hda1,2,3...) that can be mounted and symlinked with some flexibilty, making everything appear as one volume (if ye want to).
Ye can now do the same in windows (and have been for some time in the world before e.g. SUBST), but Microsoft have muddied the whole thing now and it's an immature mess. I could look at something that looks as it is a symbolic link, nonchalantly delete the link, and then subsequently find it actually was a hard link and all the folders below are now gone, not to be found in the recycle bin. :-(
Are you sure that both drives have their master/slave settings right? Have a look at the bios screen to see how they are. Windows can have some strange rules when it gets to issuing drive letters.
I have been having a look at the drives. I did have them both setup correctly, ie Master & Slave. I did notice however that one drive is ATA100 and one is ATA133. Would this make a difference ?
I'm with Mick. Look in the BIOS settings first. It's quite possible that one of the drives is turned off in the BIOS. Try looking in the BIOS when only one drive is connected.
I've never tried mixing different speed drives. Couldn't you put them on different connectors?
BTW I suspect you could get bigger drives by asking nicely on freecycle/freegle.
Right click on 'My Computer' select 'Manage' in the ensuing window, click on 'Disk management' which is a sub heading of 'Storage' you can set up your slave drive from there
On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...) double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was previously formatted or not.
And guess what - no drive letters.
If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.
You poor sods. Fancy having to deal with any of that.
My thanks to everyone for their advice. I now have the new drive working. I never knew about "diskmgmt.msc". This command worked a treat. I have been building computers now for about 5 years from parts donated and have never come accross this problem before. I wonder if it is something to do with the computer itself. It is a TIME computer with a KM400 motherboard. Thanks again for the invaluable help. JIm
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