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I have a desktop system in my office (config is pentium IV, 1GB RAM, WINXP SP3). I am trying to attach a second 250 GB hard disk to this system. The harddisk drive is detected in the BIOS and shows up in the device manager also. But it's partitions are not appearing in the mycomputer.

It is already having a large amount of data in it. It has 3 partitions.

I was using this Hard Disk Drive on some other computer as a secondary drive.

Am I missing something, what is the problem that the harddisk drive is detected in BIOS and device manager but it's partition is not showed in mycomputer. Both the harddisk have NTFS.

Please help me as I need to setup this fast.

Thanks in advance.

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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Check if the previous system from where this 250GB NTFS partitioned drive comes
was updated up to Windows XP SP3 too.

You may also want to read up Moving Disks to a Different Computer
at the bottom of this Managing and Troubleshooting Desktop Storage article.

Did you try: 'Action' ==> 'Rescan Disks' yet?

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no, the previous system was having windows xp professional service pack 2 only. Does it have something to do with this. Because in previous system I attached it as a second hard drive. The one in which winxp was installed was a 80GB drive. Filesystem on both is NTFS – Gaurav Sharma Aug 26 '09 at 7:18
no I didn't try 'Actin'->'Rescan'. will give it a try and then post again here. :-) – Gaurav Sharma Aug 26 '09 at 7:46
ok, I did that but it didn't do anything but when I clicked on the import foreign disks a dialog box appeared saying "Before Using these disks, add them to your system configuration" I want to make sure if this step is completely safe, importing and adding disks to system configuration should not hamper the data in the disks. thanks please help. thanks – Gaurav Sharma Aug 27 '09 at 6:10
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Can you verify that when you go to Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc there's a drive letter assigned?

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no the drive letter is not assigned, but there is an entry named "foreign disk". It shows the total size of the disk attached. The drive is not new, it is already having 3 partitions. – Gaurav Sharma Aug 26 '09 at 7:05
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If you right-click -> Import foreign disk, the current operating system should be able to use it. – hyperslug Aug 26 '09 at 7:19
Can you right-click it and select 'Import Foreign Disk'? This is not always an option depending on the type of disk. Would have created my own answer but I agree with the diskmgmt.msc part of this one. You are not moving a disk from XP Home to XP Pro are you? – kez Aug 26 '09 at 7:22
Thanks hyperslug, I too tried out this but the OS prompted that all data will be lost. This drive is having a lot of data, I cannot afford to loose it. :-( – Gaurav Sharma Aug 26 '09 at 7:25
Understood. nik has an informative link, check it out. – hyperslug Aug 26 '09 at 7:26
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Looks like the disk was configured as a dynamic disk. From diskmgmt.msc try to right click the disk and select import foreign disk.

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