Hello there,

Firstly I have looked through your impressive archives searching for a solution to this but have come up blank   although I'm pleased to say your archives are much much more FRIENDLY than the Microsoft knowledge base so thank you for your SITE - I've bookmarked it for regular return  

Problem with slave HDD.  Some background first - Windows XP home, home build system, ASUS motherboard, all working fine with master drive with minor peculiarity of drive letters start at E [master drive partitioned into 3 so have E, F, G partitions]

Main problem, fitted a previously used slave HDD [also having previously had 3 partitions originally set up via disk management under Windows XP home] but when viewing in disk management the slave has no drive letter assigned, although it seems to have remembered the name of the original first partition.  

Disk management SAYS the disk is healthy and active but if I right click on the diagram the only options I get are delete partition and help.

The slave HDD is a Western Digital 60GB and jumper is definitely set to slave.

This slave worked fine with its 3 partitions in an older computer, then the older master drive corrupted and I wanted to upgrade the computer anyway so I'm now struggling to understand why its gone funny.

I would prefer to be able to re-access the previously available partitions on this drive.

Any suggestions greatfully received.  I'm UK based so there may be a delay in response to any questions generated

Thank you for reading,
JillTWhat make is the Master? It would be historically INTERESTING to know how you ended up with those drive letters assigned too.Hello there,

The Master HDD is 120GB, also Western Digital with 2MB cache, 7200revs.  It was brand new to the new build.

Basically I stuck a new mother board, CPU, Master HDD into the case.  At this point I used a master HDD from a previous computer running windows 98 because I wanted to check I'd plugged everything in ok and this indeed was the case.  I then purchased the new master, partitioned it with Fdisk, then checked the BIOS was seeing everything ok then loaded XP Home.  I have no idea why the drive lettering starts with E  

At this point I can re-format the master [if necessary] as all that is on there is XP and Norton Firewall/System works plus internut connection stuff.

I don't really know which way to go at the moment but my main concern is getting access back to the slave, preferably without having to reformat it.

Any options you can think of gratefully received.    I have a laptop so I can twiddle with the desktop and still read any suggestions.

Thank you,
JillTWhen you are in Disk Management can you right clik on the slave assign it a new drive letter ?
Don't make it less than E:

I would wipe that master and rebuild it as you are looking at nothing but problems down the road with the way it is currently set up.
The NTFS thing has me wondering. NTFS can see fat files but how would it react to a fat formated harddrive. I guess the first Q should be, is your 120 ntfs of fat. Probably won't matter but just a thought.We have about 5000 computers on campus and they ALL use fat. Why you ask? Because of the 10 Win95 and 5 Win98 machines we still have on the network.  :-/ They can't see NTFS so we have to keep using fat. Now the SAD part is, those computers are on their way out the door at the first of the year. But could you imagine converting 5,000 fat machines over to ntfs  ?Since the poster didn't even mention the file system in use why is this going off on that tangent ? ?

There is a problem in re-naming that boot partition to C: in that you risk the system being un-bootable because drive letters have changed.

I would concentrate on retrieving what data you can for the time being and once you have backups re-build as i mentioned above. Quote

We have about 5000 computers on campus and they ALL use fat. Why you ask? Because of the 10 Win95 and 5 Win98 machines we still have on the network.  :-/ They can't see NTFS so we have to keep using fat. Now the sad part is, those computers are on their way out the door at the first of the year. But could you imagine converting 5,000 fat machines over to ntfs  ?