OK THEN, in my bios it recognises my 2 x40gig drives and my 30gig and cd/dvddrives ,?

Question

in device manager and in devices but it does not recognise or have a icon in the my computer menue where you would normally see your drives : A,C,D ,E... hope thats a bit clearer :) i have added a drive previously it was a 3gig at was fine ?

Answer 1

Yeah, sounds like you gotta format it. This will wipe out everything on the drive you do this on, so make sure you do the right one and I'm assuming it's empty (or you want it to be) and you have no data on that drive that you want to keep.
Here's what you do from XP:

Right click on My Computer and choose Manage.
Click on Disk Management.
maximize the window and find the drive that is about 30GB (might be disk 1)
Right click on the area and create a new partition
Then right click on it and Format it (may not need the above step)
then it's probably a good idea to reboot and error check it (rt. click on F: / properties / tools)

PS: I though you had 1 80GB, so i'm guessing that you have 2 40's on 1 ide cable and only 1 cd/dvd along with the new 30gb on the other

PSS: you can add to or edit your description in these instead of re-posting

Answer 2

Most BIOS still see A:/ as the floppy, and B:/as a floppy, whether logical or hardware exists.
All other drives are C:/ through Z:/ (24 devices, or partitions)

All must be formated to be read by the OS.

Problems can exist for the system if:
1. 1 or more drives are jumpered as CableSelect, but a normal IDE cable is used - Bios sees but OS doesn't.

2. some partitions aren't formatted in FAT32 or NTFS or a secure format that can be read, and yes, there are better ones than FAT and NTFS that do NOT screw up the drive after 3 months!

3. drives are all jumpered as either Master or Slave on the same IDE cable, they should be different. one must be Master, the other Slave.

Exceptions are that some PPC Macs and Compaqs use CS, though I have switched all mine to Master/Slave.

GNU/Linux and *BSD are some of the 800+ OTHER OSes, most ly free for download, at http://pclinuxos.com and http://livecdlist.com and http://distrowatch.com that are upto 50X faster, come with upto 134,000 FREE games, programs.

These OSes read/write ALL file formats for Unix, UDF, Windows, GNU/Linux, and *BSD. (PCBSD is too cool!)

Answer 3

If you are using Windows XP, Right click on My Computer and select Manage and go to DISK Management.

Here you would see the Hard Disks attached to the system.

If the Hard Disk is not partitioned you wont see an icon in My Computer.

Try creating a partition and formatting it using Disk Management.

If this doesnt solve your issues please get back to me.

Answer 4

hey there could be 2 reasons for this.
1: the new hard disk is not partitioned .
2: there could be an another OS installed on it example "Linux".if it is there u can go to control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management. if there both of your hard disks are present but the second one is not partitioned then you can make partitions there or if there is already a partition but with a "raw " file system then there is another OS loaded on it.

Answer 5

Make sure one of your hard drives is set as a slave. Check the pins in the back of the last hard drive you added and set it ti sl because usually it comes automatically set as master. Once you change the setting it will be recognized.