Import secondary HDD in XP Pro

Hello everyone.

I have a machine running WinXP Pro, with two 80GBHDD (IDE).

I have them both installed on the same IDE channel, one as Master, the other as Slave.

I use the Slave drive to store all my media such as music and videos on.

However, a while ago I re-installed WinXP and when I opened up "My Computer" to display all of my drives the second physical drive did not appear. I had to go to Disk Manager under Computer Management where it was identified as a "Basic Drive" with a warning symbol next to it. I right clicked on it and selected "initialize". This brought up a wizard which retreived the disk and all the data on it.

Yesterday, I once again re-installed XP and came across a problem. Upon right clicking on the drive in "Disk Management" it only gave me the option to "import foreign disk" or "convert to dynamic"????

I had use a utility on a separate machine to rip all the data off and then push it across the network back onto my secondary drive in order to get the data back which was an exhaustive process.

DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW A WAY OF "CORRECTLY" REINSTALLING AN OS ON A DRIVE AND BEING ABLE TO RETREIVE THE DATA OF A SEPARATE PHYSICAL HARD DRIVE??????

Advice much required please!

George.

just use "import foreign disk"...

Have u tried autodetect in your bios first?
I am running 2 o/s on my sys 98 and xp and both disks are able to see the other.

Start>Run>(Type) Diskmgmt.msc>ActionButton>RescanDisks>RClick the disk graphic (not the partition graphics) where it says Disk 1 Foreign, click Import Foreign Disks>Follow the instructions



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PS You more than likely have a basic disk
dont "upgrade to dynamic disks
unless you fully understand the consequences

and since the drive was originally initialized in a different XP install you will probably need to disable simple file sharing and take ownership to access your files and folders

Windows XP Professional File Sharing
Windows XP Simple File Sharing
HOW TO: Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP