cant read 2nd harddrive after reformat of 1st

Hi there, I have 2 harddrives I have used for several months. My primary harddrive was running sluggish so I decided to reformat it. I made a windows backup of the c: and placed it on my second harddrive under one of the 3 partitions I had made for that drive. After reformatting and reinstalling windows, I opened My Computer and Windows explorer and neither would recognize my 2nd harddrive. Nothing changed as far as I know except that I reformated my primary harddrive. 2nd hard drive has been and still is set up as a slave to the 1st. Can you please tell me how I can get windows to read the secondary harddrive??? Thanks

Oh and BIOS recognizes both drives. I can start up with a boot disk and DOS will recognize one of the partitions in the 2nd harddrive as well as the entire first harddrive, if that info helps


Pentium III 450
128 ram
13 gig master harddrive
30 gig slave
Windows 98 second Edition

Thanks in advance,
nmshooter

 

If you enter the bios, does the second hard drive show it's full capacity. You really should be able to access all the partitions in dos if they are there

Pretty strange problem, by chance did you install the second hard drive with overlay software, I am wondering if the overlay was stored on the primary for the secondary drive. If so I am not sure how to get around it as I think that if you reinstall the overlay software you will lose all the information on the drive, but I could be wrong on this, as I haven't used it for a long time


You could also boot to the dos prompt, run fdisk, choose option #4, make sure your secondary drive is selected, what does it say about partition information

 

[C] When I click on option 4 this is what I get

Current fixed disk drive: 1

Partition-status-Type-Volume label-Mbytes-system-usage
1_blank_non dos_blank_12237_blank_100%
c:_2_A_PRI DOS_Hurley1_11730_fat32_96%

It does not show my 2nd harddrive, but when i choose option 5 to change current fixed drive # ir shows the 2nd harddrive but not the individual partititons. It just shows the drive and the size (28630mb)

Hope this helps, I really need that info badly. I cant afford to lose it if at all possible not to.

Thnaks

 

Up, anyone else have a clue on this one

 

I used the system utility disk to make the 2nd drive readable. It was called Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools.
And as far as I know it did nothing but copy the OS from the 1st drive to the 2nd.


If you have the overlay program on the 2nd hard drive....you MUST install it on the other hard drive as well......you can't run it on just one hard drive in the same system.....either all drives need to be controlled by the overlay, or you need to remove it from the second drive.

 

Ok, I went to the western digital web site and there was a question posted in the faq's almost identical to the problem i am having.

The answer also said what you just said. and said to reboot to a boot disk and whn it comes up to the c: prompt remove the boot disk and insert the data lifeguards disk and enter DLGEZ/MBR whick apparently adds EZ bios back to the original harddrive. However when i do that, for some reason it removes the partitions on the c: drive and I have to run fdisk again, format again and reinstall windows. Then when i do that, EZ bios is no longer on the c anymore. Its like a traingle.....any advice

 

also is there any way I can remove the overlay or install an OS onto the 2nd harddrive without losing all the information on it. And if so, is that wise??

 

If your bios supports your hard drive sizes, then you don't need the overlay program......does your second hard drive have an operating system on it? If so, can you boot to it with the floppy disk for the overlay program in the floppy drive.......try to disable it from the second hard drive....you will be warned when you remove it, but you won't lose any information......reboot the computer and see if your main drive is recognized.

 

to be honest, i dont know if it does or not, i never installed one on it but i assumed whne i installed it, it was copying from the first harddrive.

I will check on how to remove the overlay from the 2nd drive though.

Thanks for your help, ill keep everyone informed

 

Actually, the more I think about it, I don't think it matters if it has an operating system on it or not.....you should still be able to choose the second hard drive by booting with the utility disk.......