Hi guys, I have 2 maxtor (60gb pr master and 200gb pr slave) that worked perfectly until I reinstalled Winxp, just to see that the 200gb hdd has become invisibile in My Computer but can be seen as hardware with all its stats and is operative. But there's no way to access it.
In Disk management the hdd is "active" (italian xp version) but still no way to access its menu to change or assign a letter. In all activities the only submenu open is "cancel partition".

- primary ms -> hdd 60
- primary slave -> hdd 200 that never hosted any OS and worked perfectly until I reinstalled Winxp.
Sec ms and slave set for two optical units. I tried to disconnect and reattach the ide cable but no way to settle that

Is there a way to set that? Any help would be appreciated. Thanx

I don't understand "Sec ms and slave set for two optical units." What do you mean? If the HD's are on the same cable, make sure the HD's are set for master/slave and not "cable select".

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

I meant that the hdds are set on primary (the missing one with no OS is slave) while optical drives are on secondary. I never touched ide cable nor set bios before reinstalling xp, but after doing it the second hdd disappeared from "My computer" and became inaccessable but can still be seen in Disk management ith its stats and "NO LETTER" and no way to assign one to it.
thanx for your help

I tried to activate the Recovery Console and I could see the hdd but couldn't activate FIXMBR command cuz I don't want it to format my hdd. I couldn't neither create a new partition there. Any help? thanx

If I understand correctly, the second drive worked correctly prior to the XP reinstall?

Disk manager will show the drive because it's physically present. However, something is wrong in the logical format since the drive doesn't appear (obviously ).

Double check the jumpers on the back of each HD and make sure they are set correctly; the original is "master" and the second one is "slave". Also, look at your bios to make sure all the IDE positions are enabled and in auto, if available.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

the jumpers are ok. I used Ultimate boot cd and Maxtor Utility and I discovered that the hdd200 has no file type (It was supposed to appear as NTFS). So I couldn't transfer files from a hdd to another.
Is there a way to assign a letter to a hdd? It was impossible in Disk Management as the right-click menu showed only "cancel" and "online Help".
I'm getting more and more frustrated about that since I don't want to lose all my 150 gigs of stuff...
What u think?

It sounds right now that it's not formatted. Can you check that the 200GB drive works in another computer? What if you put it as "master" or as an only drive?

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

I can't since it has no OS inside. Well I used "get data back" and got more than 70gigs to save on dvd. then I'll have to format it so I can use it again. thanx for your help

I think is because the Windows XP only let you have HD up to 128GB (or was it 132GB but is something like that) anything more then that you'll need to install the windows "SP2" or go to the webpage of your hd maker and download the driver and install it. i had the same things to my computer can't see my new hd but after instaling the new driver every things is ok.

hope thats help

yes dude, it was all about that but I fixed it. Thanx anyway