Hard Disk doesnt appear in explorer but appears in 'system'?

[Khorask]

I got myself a new Seagate 80 GIG drive a few months ago and had to install a software update to get it registering correctly in the BIOS. I then installed XP and everything was fine and the drive was used as a slave basically for storage.
Now ive dual booted ME and XP.. ive tried both ME and 98 but want ME..

In ME and I noticed during the installation in DOS that my 80 GIG does not show up.. like it doesnt exist ? but when I go back into XP it does. The drive is properly formatted being FAT 32, NOT NTFS which was the only idea I had. In XP disk manager the drive is marked as being 'BASIC' and NOT 'Dynamic Disk' and it reports everything as fine.

Also in ME when I go to 'system' and look at the disk drives tabs the hard drive is there.. when I look at the details it says the device is working properly but there are no drive letters assigned and they are greyed out.

I wrote Seagate about this and they told me that it sounded like an OS problem and to contact Microsoft, which is kinda hard to get a response....

Seagate have a drive setup utility I tried but it will only set up the drive if it can format it and I cant loose the 70 GIG I already have stored. When I used this app in ME I noticed that IT DID detect the HDD as actually being there, but yeah, I cant see it in explorer.

Basically, I need to use this drive in both ME and XP and I cant see it in explorer in ME or in DOS... It reports correctly (size etc) in the BIOS.

Any Ideas appretiated...

[Force Flow]

Wait a sec, let me try to clear a few things up:

Do you have two HDD's, or just one? I'm not clear on that.

How do you have the O/S's installed? On the same partition/drive or on seperate partitions/drives?

Can you access the drive through the "Run" command? Start > Run > type "x:\" ("x" being the drive letter)

[Khorask]

Ok I have two hard drives..
The 80 GIG is a second drive im using just for storage.. 1 partiton.

My first drive as a 10 GIG partioned in two..
I installed ME onto the first and then Installed XP on the second partiton. I was told to install them in this order so that OS manager would work correctly

I cant access the drive though run commands, shortcuts made in XP etc etc.

[Force Flow]

Try running scandisk on it.

[Khorask]

How can I run scandisk on it if I cant see it ?

[GaryRouth]

Hi Khorask

Can you post more information about the "software update to get it registering correctly in the Bios"? Are you referring to an update for the Bios on your motherboard? Or are you referring to installing a drive-overlay type of program, such as OnTrack Disk Manager (a version of which is provided with the Seagate Disk Wizard software). The drive overlay is usually only used when there is no update available for the motherboard's Bios.

If you are using a drive overlay program, it must load at startup, or the drive won't be usable. If you are bypassing your normal startup files by using a "selective startup" (sysconfig and msconfig allow such startups, and Safe Mode also bypasses many startup files) then it is possible that the drive overlay is not loading when you start WinME.

____
When exactly did you start dual-booting? You mention "then I installed WinXp" and everything was fine?? Do you mean that you originally didn't dual boot, and then reinstalled, adding in WinME and then reinstalling XP?

I'll check back later to see how you're doing.
. . . Gary

[Force Flow]

Originally posted by Khorask How can I run scandisk on it if I cant see it ?

I ment try it in a DOS prompt. You might be able to see it there...or might not.