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"Adding a second hard drive"

Arrggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Put a second hard disk in my PC, that is running win me. The second (new) hard disk already has data on it that i want to keep. The hard disk shows up in the bios settings fine, but windows can't seem to recognize it? any ideas? cheers

Gah, evil.

Xp did recognise the 'me' drive, but not straight away. I found this out the hard way. I was messing around in Xp after i had finished burning it all on to cd (the pc had been on for 10 mins or so), when XP just randomly said, "new drive found"... nice.

Ah, the old NTFS thing. Yes, WinME can't see NTFS in the same way it can't see EXT2, EXT3 and Reiserfs. Stupid, I know. However, I would have recommended booting the XP drive with ME as a slave, then copying them from an XP environment to the ME disk, then re-swapping them.

At a slight tangent...

Luke, does XP absolutely refuse to recognise EXT2/3 still? What are the chances of software that'll read EXT2/3 FSs from a Windows environment, apart from VMware?

Darkus wrote:
> Sorted it. Apparently NFTS is not compaitable with FAT 32, although it is
> backwards compaitable.That is why Win ME could not see the drive with Win XP on
> it. Had to burn 4 GB on to CDs in the end. bummer.

Didn't want to say it but.... He told you so :)

And I agreed. So clap. No? Nevermind.

Sorted it. Apparently NFTS is not compaitable with FAT 32, although it is backwards compaitable.That is why Win ME could not see the drive with Win XP on it. Had to burn 4 GB on to CDs in the end. bummer.

AliBoy wrote:
> did you Fdisk the new drive?
I don't think the contents of the slave matter
> that much as windows will boot of the master. If it dosn't have a name (C: , D:
> etc) then it sounds like you haven't Fdisk 'ed and formatted the new drive.

But if he needs information off of the new (yet previously used) HDD, then surely he cant format it?

Having two versions of Windows on the two disks may confuse it, though I'm not sure. Cant you use CD's or someother form of link to transfer the data? Because when I installed a second HDD, it needed to be formatted. If it already has data on it, Windows may have some kinda problem?

If you cant transfer the data in another way, perhaps putting the HDD back in the PC it came from, and wiping windows first may help?

As you can tell by now, I dont know much :)

Also the file compression methods, fat 32 and nfts, may be incompatible. Kinda like trying to transfer data from a compressed floppy onto a PC that is not using the same compression method. any way of changing Win ME to NFTS? may work, I'm not sure. My second HDD was blank, so I didn't have this problem.

Sorry if that didn't help

did you Fdisk the new drive?
I don't think the contents of the slave matter that much as windows will boot of the master. If it dosn't have a name (C: , D: etc) then it sounds like you haven't Fdisk 'ed and formatted the new drive.

AMD_MAN wrote:
> What File Allocation tables are on each drive ?, as win xp is most likely to be
> NTFS and winme will be fat 32.

c.b.

this may explain it

yep, xp is ntfs, and me is fat 32. what does this mean!!!!

What File Allocation tables are on each drive ?, as win xp is most likely to be NTFS and winme will be fat 32.

c.b.

this may explain it

both drives already have windows on them, one has xp , one has me. i need to take data off of one of them to put on the other. I think both drives are showing up in contol panel>system, but one of them is not showing a drive letter.
C: D: etc..