Second HDD issues

Hello all! I thought I should use the collective experience of the community here before I go and break anything. Thanks in advance for any replies, here's the situation:

I decide to add a second HDD to my rather mish mash PC, using a 500GB WD Caviar Black to compliment the ageing 200GB Seagate drive the computer originally came with. The XP home install on the original drive has never been altered, so I was planning to transfer all of my documents to this second hard drive and install another new one to put Windows 7 on in a few months.

I have fitted the drive and it is visible in Device Manager, but not under a drive letter in Explorer. I have gone into Disk Manager, which sometimes claims Disk 0 is "Unreadable". After a few rescans, it shows three sections in Disk 0. The first is the recovery partition D: inserted by Compaq, the second is my main drive C: and the third is "Unallocated". I'm assuming this is the new disk, but it gives a random amount of available storage. The first time it said 704GB, now 918GB. If I right click this section I can bring up the New Partition wizard, but in all the guides I have seen, a new physical disk should appear as Disk 1 below the existing HDD. I don't want to somehow reformat all that I currently have, so thought I should ask here first. Sorry for the wordiness, but I wanted to be clear!

Thanks, Niko =]

I take it it's a sata hd, are you running it in legacy pata mode (IDE emulation) in the bios?
If you're running it in AHCI mode then you probably need to install the correct drivers for it to be recognised.

You may need to format the new drive as well.

Both disks are SATA, and I'm afraid I don't know too much about poking around in the BIOS. You all probably despair at someone like me, but I don't really know what I'm doing!

PS Your Project Spork thread is a good read!

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Earlier I wrote a lovingly crafted response until Flash crashed and killed my session.
And people wander why I hate Flash so much. The sooner we can use non-Flash-based advertising for Hexus the better.

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Anyway lets see what we can do here.

As you've discovered Disk Manager shows the system attached media devices. This includes hard drives, media card readers, USB sticks and optical drives.
Each drive is listed individually so in a system with 2 hard drives you should see 2 drives listed alongside the usual DVDROM etc you may also have installed. This should be the case here with Disk 0 being your original Seagate and Disk 1 your new Caviar.
There are exceptions involving RAID configurations but this should not affected you.

Again, as you can see with your Seagate, the partitions for each disk are also displayed. It is usual for big OEMs to include a small partition to keep their admin tools which you can access during the boot process. This is to help diagnose system faults. In your case that is the Compaq partition.
Each partition has its size shown so you should be able to calculate how much space the Unallocated portion of the drive is. Bear in mind formatted sizes will be smaller than unformatted.

Generally unallocated space can be partitioned by right-clicking the empty space and following the on-screen options. If the unallocated space is on Disk 0 alongside the other partitions then the implication is you havn't been using all the drive. However in your case where the unallocated space is fluctuation there appears to be an issue that needs resolving first before attempting to format that space.
As you point out you don't want to loose data.


Putting the current drives issue to one side for a moment.
You say your new hard disc doesn't appear in the Disk Manager screen in Windows. Does it appear in the BIOS screen when you boot the PC?

If it's SATA how many groups of sockets on the motherboard are there and which group did you connect it too? If you have two SATA controllers there's a change you've attached the drive to a controller that's not yet enabled in the BIOS.


I'm getting ahead of myself here however. If you've a little more detail it'd be appreciated :)

Hello, thank you for taking the time to reply!

In Disk Manager, I'm assuming the "Unallocated" space in Disk 0 is originating from the new HDD. My original partitions are 187GB and 4GB, which allowing for formatting and the 1000=1024 marketing discrepancy is the full 200GB in use. I'm happy there is no spare space on the disk.

I have attached the new WD drive to the second SATA port, with the Seagate in the top one. My motherboard has a single row of 4 SATA ports. For any more information, this is my model here:
http://uk.msi.com/index.php?func=pro...2_no=&cat3_no=

Or:
http://www.hardware.info/en-US/produ...80MILS_MS7093/
I know the model numbers are slightly different, but it appears to be the same board.

In the BIOS, the original disk is seen as Third Channel Device 0, and the new one is registered as a 500GB disk as Forth Channel Disk 0.

Are the jumper settings important enough to have the effects I'm seeing? I was under the impression a SATA 3 Gbit/s device would drop down to SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, which is the speed I think my motherboard would prefer. If you think it will help I'll get some jumpers and force it into the slower mode.

I am posting on Hexus from my netbook, so I can leave the BIOS open to give more information if needed. Thanks again,
Niko =]

Oooo fun!

I get the distinct impression the motherboard is reporting your drives as a RAID array. This would explain why the extra space is appearing on Disk 0 - because the OS is being told by the RAID controller there is only 1 disk - which is fine if this is true.

According to your motherboard specs your four SATA ports will be controlled by two different controllers - your manual will tell you which is which. Both controllers support RAID 0 or 1.

Questions:
Does the unallocated space equal the total size of the other partitions already listed?
If so it sounds like it's in RAID0 since both drives in a RAID0 must be the same size.
Or does the unallocated space equal the size of the new drive?
If so it sounds like the RAID controller is operating in JBOD mode. Basically it totals up all the available space on all attached drives and shows them as one lump to the OS.


One possible quick fix in this scenario would be to attach the new drive to either of the other two SATA ports and therefore the other controller. Make sure the controller is on in the BIOS and you should then see windows report your new drive as Disk 1 with no unallocated space on Disk 0.
In this way you avoid the RAID fiddling you might other wise require.


Does this fit with what you are seeing?

Sadly, as a prebuilt system from PC World, there is no motherboard manual. Obviously I won't be buying from them again, but it's hard to get on the internet to find out about and buy PCs without having... a PC.

I'm searching around the internet for a manual, but the one I've found is taking forever to load each page on a new webpage, so I decided to just try the drive in a new port. I've gone for the third one down. They are all different colours, with no writing on them that I can make out.

The unallocated space hasn't been either of the two options you gave, being over 700GB the first time and then over 900GB.

Anyway, time to see what SATA port number three brings.. I'll report back what happens!

In an impressive result, my PC will now no longer boot at all, using start normally or last known good options. It was having some issues before, but that's why I wanted this second disk in, to make sure I had everything before I put Windows 7 on a new HDD. Oh dear.. :(

Ok, so scratch what I said before... After finding no obvious menu option for "Stop trying to boot when it's not really happening" I entered the , just to stop it revving up and down. After poking around a while, wandering off and doing a few other things, I try to boot up again. Choosing "start normally" it works first time. Strange, no?

So I get back to Disk Manager, and now the old drive in the first SATA port shows as Disk 1, with both partitions but still 900GB of phantom unallocated space. My new disk has appeared as Disk 0, unallocated and not initialised. It shows about 466GB, which sounds about right for a "500GB" disk.

I also have a System Settings Change dialogue box asking me to restart, though given my troubles with booting I am loathe to do this. Should I restart, or try to initialise and partition the disk without? Also, does it matter that my OS install is on Disk 1 rather than Disk 0? Thanks again!
Niko =]

Sounds like you swapped more than just one cable?
It's also possible the BIOS has a setting for the priority of which hard drive it tries to boot from first. It may be the case it will only allow boots from one of the controllers - have a look at the options in the BIOS and see what it has.

The system change Windows mentions is likely the move from Disk 0 to Disk 1 for the Windows installation.
Might seem daft but if you're still not getting anywhere with the BIOS and you want them swapped back you might try swapping the SATA connections around. If the BIOS is restricted to boot from one controller only this should sort it out.

However I'm somewhat uneasy about that random unallocated space on your old drive. As Pob suggested earlier have you considered looking for updates?
In this case I'd try Seagate's site and see if there's a firmware revision for your drive.

Failing that I'd be looking to copy the first two partitions from old drive to new. Partition Magic, Acronis Trueimage and Norton Ghost all offer methods of achieving this. As your using XP you may find copies of Partition Magic 8 or newer free on a cover disc somewhere. These are the only tools I've used for this and sadly they all usually cost so maybe someone else can suggest a freeware/shareware alternative they've found to be reliable?

Once copied to the new drive the partition with the new 'C' partition will need to be made active to allow you to boot from it. Then you're free to nuke the old drive and hopefully get rid of the unallocated space issue.

I did swap two cables, but sadly one was a fan so I've no idea why my original disk has moved from 0 to 1. The BIOS seems pretty limited, but perhaps it's just my lack of experience... There is however a boot order and the Seagate is the first HDD it will try.

My plan has always been to nuke my old drive with it's garbled 5 year old XP install. I just want to run this new disk along side it to move all the info across before I get another new HDD for a clean OS.

Should I try to initialise and partition my new drive as Disk 0? I've read that it doesn't really matter to Windows, as long as it knows where the C: drive is.. I've just sort of left it, not restarted as per the instruction and not tried partitioning...

It's not so much that Windows doesn't mind.
Hidden in the root of C: you should find a file called boot.ini which tells Windows what disk and partition it resides on. As long as this matches up all will be well.

Setting up your new drive as Disk 0 should not present problems as long as the boot.ini is pointing at the right place for your Windows install.

(unhelpful right now but worthy of reading: a 5 year old XP install on a seagate drive is worth getting everything off asap, it's not gonna last long, and you're right to be trying)

Can you either:

A) plug your PC into a network with another pc and transfer the important files across to them for the meantime?
B) burn really critical stuff to CD or DVD
C) copy it all to an external hard drive of any sort, even if you borrow one to do it

Because I think it's worth taking out the seagate, and installing XP fresh onto the new drive.. leaving the old one there are an untouched backup drive for a few weeks while you get your new drive installed and configured. Then, when you're totally sorted, you can destroy the old drive, coas it's at the end of it's reilable life.

I've been meaning to switch to a more sensible backup solution for a while, and this is part of it.. I think all of my critical info has been copied off to an external drive, and from there onto my netbook as well, but I wanted to make absolutely sure I got everything. Thank you for the concern though! I would have reinstalled onto a fresh disk a long time ago, but my original pre built PC didn't come with an installation CD, just a recovery partition, with no real documentation... XP disks seem quite rare and expensive now, so there are probably few people looking forward to Windows 7 as much as me!