Problem with Old C: Drive
October 26th, 2023
Bought a solid state drive today put my windows onto it and tried to use my old drive as a backup now bios is finding it but when i load windows it is not appearing in my computer.
You either need to activate it or assign it a drive letter in Disk Management.
Launch the Control Pa:
1 – Select System & Security
2 – Select Administrative Tools
3 – Select Computer Management
4 – Select Disk Management
5 – Select “unlettered” drive (then right mouse on the drive)
6 – Add a drive letter
7 – Volume now appears in windows explorer and you should be able to access the drive.
or: if this is what you’re seeing instead…
In step 5, if you do not see any thing saying “unlettered”, but see that the second drive had a red “x” on it, you do the right-mouse click and chose “online”. The drive letter should appear, and the volume should now appear in windows explorer, and you should be able to access the drive.
i dont see it on my drive its also not showing in the list above as you can see from my screenshot
so you installed an os on your newly installed solid state HD. now it boots to the solid state os (7/8)? That matters because the boot files are different for xp. anyway, your pressing issue is windows explorer is not assigning a letter to the partition/s on the old drive. goto the disk manager/computer manager and determine if it will let you assign a letter. of course do not format anything. if that is not possible (you did not mention if the old drive was ide or sata). if ide it might need a different jumper configuration. Slave or cable select. There would be no reason that with the correct jumper config that windows explorer would not read the old drive. Possibly put the old drive on a different ribbon cable if ide. if sata it should read straight off. If you want a dual boot and the os’es are 7 or 8 easybcd will configure the drive partition to boot properly. you may try to recover the old os with a repair from the install disk. That gets tricky because that frequently leaves you booting to the last recovered os. if you go from 7 then install 8, it should automatically give you the options of either os. easybcd will help in this regard if you encounter problems. You probably get the sense you must try a variety of techniques to get the drive readable again. a last ditch option would be using a program like ker for windows to recover the data from a drive that appears in manager but does not allow you to assign a letter. hope this is sufficiently coherent.
edit; if it is not in disk management at all then feel the drive to determine if it is warm and spinning=working=connected properly. I see a backup drive. didn’t you say that was what you were going to use it for/name it?
what is disk 2? yes, my money is on that is your old disk and the jumper config or corrupted file system.
no i have two drives the one im referring to was the one i was using this morning to boot windows since then ive changed to my ssd
btw it was a sata drive not ide
as i said its showing up in bios but if i try boot from it, it says boot mgr is missing
no i have two drives the one im referring to was the one i was using this morning to boot windows since then ive changed to my ssd
btw it was a sata drive not ide
as i said its showing up in bios but if i try boot from it, it says boot mgr is missing
right, easybcd can install a repaired bcd=boot file on your old partition but that does not do a thing for why it does not show in disk management. sata requires no config. I guess recover what you can, a recovery program will most likely read the drive if bios sees it. then use a partition manger to format. must be a corrupt file system. that’s my best on that.
edit: when you say but if i try boot from it, it says boot mgr is missing, it is giving you options to boot from? bcdeasy can fix that, as I said, not though is you boot to the ssd and you cant see the drive. something else is wrong besides the boot files.
i just want to try format it nothing important is on it maybe if i can try format it the drive will show in windows
how can i format it if it aint showing though
Sorted it, had to create a simply volume labelled it Drive E: and its now showing 600gb in my computer now
cheers for help
Now it makes sense..
For a while I thought you meant that it was your C: (SSD) drive that wasn’t showing !