Secondary hard drive shows on BIOS but not OS?

Question

i ahve a 550mHz pentium celeron with a 10.2 gig hard drive added, but recently i tried to add a secondary hard drive 120Gig, i went to BIOS and checked if it was being detected by it; it was adn it was as AUTO. so when i run my OS the XP doesnt recognize the secondary Hard drive.. i mean like it doesnt show up on My Computer,so what is wrong? is there any way of finding out if one is formatted in a different way? like i know my primary is set as NTFS. but is there a way of finding out if the other hard drive is set as FAT, if it is can i change it?

By the way they are both IDE

Answer 1

The drive won't show up until it's partitioned and formatted. ITo do this in Windows XP, go to Control Panel, Accessories, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. The drive should be showing up there as an unformatted, unpartitioned drive. If you right-click on the drive there, you can partition it, then format it and assign it a drive letter.

Answer 2

Before Windows will see the drive, you have to set it up in the Disk management. Go to the Control Panel, and double-click the Adminstrative Tools icon. Go to the Computer Management icon. Then the Disk Management section of the window that appears.

You should be able to see your second drive listed there. You can then partition and format (FAT32 or NTFS) the drive and assign it a letter.

Answer 3

Have you tried formatting the drive?

That sounds like the Mb might be old enough to have the 32 Gb limitation too. You can either partition the disk to have several 30 Gb partitions, or try to get a BIOS upgrade.

Answer 4

It is very likely that your BIOS has the 32Gb limitation. BIOS upgrade might help but alternatively if you have USB ports, you could just make your 120Gb drive an external drive.

Answer 5

Okay... wasn't really a question, unless you mean to ask if it is okay to do that? shouldn't be any problems as long as you're putting the jumpers in correctly.