TWO hard-drives… I think!!??

[Rasu]

Can anyone please help me figure out how I can use both my harddrives?? I recently got a used computer from someone who left the country. The PC has 2 harddrives when I open it up, but when I log in, I can only see one drive (Drive C).

I ran an application that gives a screenshot information of installed components in our PC (called Belarc Advisor), and it gave me the following information about my processor and harddrive:

Processor:
450 megahertz Intel Pentium III (2 installed)
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Hard Drives:
27.31 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
21.38 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

FUJITSU MPE3273AH [Hard drive] (27.32 GB) -- drive 0
FUJITSU MPE3273AH [Hard drive] (27.32 GB) -- drive 1

So it looks like I actually have dual Pentium 3 processors, and two internal harddrives as well. Is that right? More importantly, how can I access the SECOND harddrive, so that I can perhaps format it and use it as extra storage space?? Please please help.

Thank you.

[coolcps]

That one C drive could be both of the drives, in a RAID configuration.

[Rasu]

But does that mean that I have TWO drives in the RAID configuration of 27.32 GB each,... and that I am only using one of them?

i.e do I have 27.32 GB or 54.64 GB??


Thanks. I like the RAID theory... I think you are right.

[Confused]

Depends on what RAID configuration is running. If stripe it should be 54G and if mirrow 27G. Since Belrac is reporting 27 it looks like mirrow.
Chas

[Haasman]

But wait, the FUJITSU MPE3273AH are IDE drives.

Have you looked in System Properties regarding the OS seeing the second hard drive?

[Rasu]

Thank you for the reply guys. I was able to right click "my computer>manage>disk management", and from there, I saw the second harddrive, assigned it a letter (Drive_E), and was prompted to format it (it was empty). I formated it in NTFS, and I now have my 2 harddrives back!

:-)

[Haasman]

Good job. Nice when it is so simple.

Now a suggestion: If you haven't consumed all of your first drive, use the second as a complete backup of the first.

Go back and turn off the second drive so the OS can't find it. Leave it enabled as before in the BIOS.

Used Norton Ghost and from the 3.5" boot disk, create an image or copy of the first drive. Now anytime a you want a complete restore image of the first it is availabe, as good as your last backup.

Or, since you are running NTFS, use the XP CD and find MS backup and copy all your files to the second drive.

The probability of two hard drives failing as the exact same time are close to zero.