windows won't racognize and assign a drive letter to my second hard drive

[enfx]

I have 2 Western Digital Caviar 22100 Drives. Windows won't recognize my second drive. My Bios recognizes it but it doesnt show up in windows. When I go to the device manager and click on disk drives, it's listed, but where it shows the drive letter, it is blank and I can't change it. It worked on my old computer, but I needed a program called ez-bios for it to recognize it. I tried to load that, but it won't load. Should Windows detect it automatically?

[narayan]

Make sure the jumpers on the back of the HD's are set to Master and Slave, accordingly.

[smokin1]

Just another thought, has the second drive been formatted yet? It won't show up until it has.
http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[wtp]

first of all, make sure you autodetected that new harddrive from the BIOS, then make sure that harddrive, is formatted, and if you want.. partitioned..

wtp

[800XL]

Ezbios is the problem here. Ezbios allows older machines to recognize larger hard drives by getting in between the bios of the system and the hard drive. The side effect is that the drive geometry is setup so that ezbios can read it, but a bios that can work without ezbios will see the drive differently. Things like the partition table, FAT, and so forth are not in the same place and perhaps not the same format as they should be. End result is that the data on the drive is not visible unless ezbios is installed.

I would get that drive back in the older system and verify that your data is even still there. Once you start to mess with ezbios it is not hard to hose it and lose your data. To get the information you need transfered across may be a lot of work. If you can network the two machines, or move the info with zip disks or (shudder) floppies, do so. Swapping drives back and forth may be a tall order. If you've got an older drive that the older machine can use without ezbios that may work better. Suffice it to say, you have a lot more complicated problem that it appears on the surface.

[enfx]

Thanks for all of your help. I just signed up for this last week and I am really surprised at the feedback that I get. I really do appreciate your responses. My next step was to put the drive back in the old system and connect to my new computer and just transferring the info that way. I was just hoping that I wouldn't have to do that! Oh well, that's just the way it goes sometimes. Thanks again.

[socalgal]

Hi enfx

Great members we have here eh? http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

Moved this thread to the Tech Support forum.