Disk drive found but not accessible

[Dietmar Schulke]

Hello!
I put a second disk in the computer. It was already formatted (normally i'm using it in another computer) and thus had one NTFS partition (for OS) and three other FAT32 partitions. I expected not to have any problems, but it turns out that windows founds the drive and device manager shows no problem, but windows explorer (or total commander) act as this second drive wasn't formatted. What to do?
Thanx!

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Has the drive a driver letter assigned? Is the status of the disk good? Do you see it as foreign in the disk manager? If so, try importing the disk.

[Dietmar Schulke]

The drive has only ONE letter assigned, even though there are 4 partitions on it. When i try to acces the drive, win explorer says it's not formatted. BUT:
The disk is in perfect condition, brand new. I took it out of my second computer because I wanted to copy some large stuff onto it. It works fine, i tried to boot (the second pc) from it afterwards and it's still ok.
Device manager in the first pc says the drivers are ok and finds no problems.
BIOS found the drive.
Thanx for help.

[Dietmar Schulke]

What do you mean by importing the disk?

[e4services]

Sounds as if your 'windows' is not Windows XP. If you have Windows NT with an NTFS partition, it does not FAT32 abilities. If you do have XP, then I would guess that the drive has been configured incorrectly in the BIOS when you istalled it, that is, a different translation table was use (heads, cylinders) than in the old computer. THat is easy to verify by putting it back in the old computer and looking at the BIOS then moving it back and making sure the new computer uses the same, even if you have to enter it by hand.

[Hareesh A V]

Hi,
which is your os?.ensure that correct no.of hdd drivers are loaded, after connecting the hdd to the pc.you can try to remove the drive from the device manager and check.or you can see the detected status of the new hdd from manage option of my computer.check that the new disk is a healthy drive and no yellow or red mark is there .If problem existing then u try to format the disk in that system after taking data backup.

Thanks
Hareesh
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[Dietmar Schulke]

Both of them are winXP computers. I will check bios for drive geometry. It's still strange that this is happening, but i was using the auto disk detecting feature in bios and that may be root of my problems.
Thanx for suggestions!

[Dietmar Schulke]

I guess it was the most obvious problem, namely the bios does not support such a large drive.
I think i'll just go and buy a RAID pci card and attach the drive to it. I don't want to mess around with bios.
Thanx again.