Windows Me Won't Recog Old HDD

[Tycho01]

Reformatted my C: drive recently, pulling out the D: (drive in question) to prevent any accident. After reinstalling Windows Me, and putting the D: back in (Maxtor 40g), I've found that although it's listed in BIOS and Window's "System Information", it hasn't been given a drive letter and is inaccessible.

I've worked on it for days now, and Maxtor's disk utility doesn't work, nor does removing the drive from power and IDE.

Any help recognizing my old HDD of Futurama episodes, etc. would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[Tycho01]

Sorry, forgot to mention that I have a Dell Dimension 8100 with a 1.3G processor, nothing attached via USB, yet, and have gone through CMOS and disabled the drive and deleted it from Windows Device Manager before reconnecting.

Also, when I took the drive out and rebooted w/o it, I received something like "Primary Drive not found. Press F1 to continue..."

This is exactly the way it was set up a week ago, jumpers and all.

[Dooin' it]

A couple questions........

#1.) Did you reinstall *all* drivers/utilities from Dell's drive/util disk?? I can't remember if Dell had it all packaged as one back then, but these days, the OS and drive/util disks are separate.

#2.) How is the drive setup?? Slave on IDE1?? Or Master on IDE2.

#3.) .......which begs the question........is there an IDE2 on that mobo??

I'd try slave to your C: on IDE1, then master on IDE2 & see if it shows up in MyComputer at all. If that doesn't work, certainly curse at it for therapeutic affect......that always helps me.....

Also, perhaps instead of being *auto* recognized, you might actually try using the Add/Remove hardware wizard to see if it pulls itself up that way??

[Tycho01]

Thanks for the quick reply, Dooin'.
1. I reinstalled all the drivers/ utilities from Dell's two disks (yup, separate).
2. If I remember my last config (not at home), D is set up as slave on the Primary IDE on the middle connector and C is set as master on Primary IDE channel at the end of the ribbon.
3. And lastly, there are both a Primary and Secondary IDE, with secondary holding my CD/CD-RW/A:

And yeah, I felt kind of funny trying to pull up my HDD using Add/Remove to no avail. Cursing only helps once a day! Then I return the next day to the same problem.

[PC_Fanatic]

A couple of things to try:

Check your jumpers again. C=Master D=Slave

Check the CMOS settings to make sure you're booting from the master, not the slave.

Go back to Windows Device Manager and make sure that the drive is enabled.

Boot from a floppy & see if the drive exists in DOS.

[Tycho01]

Thanks, And I did try all of that, but.. somehow I think it should be really easy. Basically, I just took the D: drive off, reformatted, and then put it back on after installing Windows again on the C:

I hadn't changed any jumpers, cables, BIOS, or anything else.

So far nothing.
Thank you for your ideas, though.

[Neř]

dude,
try using a new ribbon cable!!!
i had that exact problem, but when i got a new cable, the system started to recognize the drive in windows....
sometimes the wires in ribbon cables get chewed up and then the drive only shows up in BIOS, but not in windows.....

-Neř

[Tycho01]

Well, last night I disconnected the D:Maxtor and decided to test Windows Me by installing an old Quantum Fireball Plus 13.5 that I had sitting around.

NO PROBLEM!

Windows Me showed an accessible D: with the Quantum on it.
So I reconnected the Maxtor and... again, nothing. Ran the Maxtor Utility (again) to check for errors. It "Passed".

What the hell?

I appreciate the idea, NE0, but something's telling me that's not it, yet. However, I might pick up a new cable anyway (been looking at those fancy round silver ones).

Please, anyone else have any idea how to fix this?

[Tycho01]

Never came across an answer so I just wrote over Windows Me with Windows XP and voila! Back to work.