I have just installed a new motherboard asus p4c800-e and a new maxtor 6y160po harddrive. I have my old harddrive as a slave and want to boot to the new harddrive with windows xp Pro. My problem is that I can not seem to acces the old hard drive. When I formatted the new hard drive, for some reason it comes up as e: my cdrom drive as d: and my zip drive as c:. My old drive is there at bootup and I have tried partition magic and it sees the old drive as *. but will not let me change the drive letter or will let me access the information. The old drive is a ibm ddta 372730. I have the new drive as master and the old drive as slave on primary ide and the dvd as master and the zip as slave on the secoundary ide. The old drive does not show on my computer. Is there any way to reassign the drive letters to c:primary,d: 2nd drive, e: dvd, and e: zip. I need to get some information off the old drive but then would like to format it and make it for additional storage. I would appreciate any help and suggestions.

hi Ron,

A note, ur zip drive couldn't be C:, it usually is the primary master.
Let's try this trial and error method... try fixing only ur new HDD as master on the primary IDE and ur old HDD as master on the second IDE.
If it works, copy the things tat u wanted onto ur new HDD. Then try moving ur old HDD to the primary IDE as slave, without attaching anything on the second IDE.
Then attaching everything one by one...
Tell me where did u reach.

Thanks for your input and I will work on that. For your info though when I look at the system bios the primary Ide shows that it is the hard drives and the 2nd shows master as dvd and slave as zip.hi Ron,

A note, ur zip drive couldn't be C:, it usually is the primary master.
Let's try this trial and error method... try fixing only ur new HDD as master on the primary IDE and ur old HDD as master on the second IDE.
If it works, copy the things tat u wanted onto ur new HDD. Then try moving ur old HDD to the primary IDE as slave, without attaching anything on the second IDE.
Then attaching everything one by one...
Tell me where did u reach.

[Thanks Ghost I tried unhooking everything except the new hard drive as master on IDE 1 It still thinks that is E:. Any other suggestions? Will flashing the bios change that or the cmos?

[Thanks Ghost I tried unhooking everything except the new hard drive as master on IDE 1 It still thinks that is E:. Any other suggestions? Will flashing the bios change that or the cmos?

I ran into something similiar when I added drives to my NT4 server last month. To get around it, I created mirrors of the system drive, one of the mirrors was Drive C. After NT was finished building the new drive, I broke the mirror, edited boot.ini on the newly created mirror, and restarted. No more problems thereafter. I did a command line compare, and found differences only in new trash files (temp, logs, etc), and wiped the first drive (originally the system drive), and eventually refomatted it as a ReiserFS partition. Now I got a multiboot server. I use the bios to choose which hard drive to boot from.

Oh, I forgot about that. Some BIOSes allow you to specify which channel (Pri/Sec) and drive (0/1) to boot from. Double check yours to ensure you aren't getting bit by this feature.

First have your original hard drive as the master.
The new maxtor as the slave.
Go to the maxtor web site and download there installation software, maxblaster.
Make a bootable floopy.
Boot from the floppy.
It will find the new hard drive and you will select install. It will ask if you want it to be a new boot hard drive. After selecting it will format it and then copy all the information from the old drive to the new. When done it will prompt to shut down the computer and remove the old hard drive and change the new hard drive jumper to master.

good luck

I agree it seems to me that you formated your drive in windows and possibly set it as an extended drive rather than a primary drive so windows will add it to the end on the drive letter list. Re formating the drive as a primary drive might solve this issue for you.

It seems to me that there is a presedure to removing your oridgeinal Drive. You have to release the command that made that drive a boot drive, and you then have to make your new drive the active boot drive. Changing drive letters can be straightend out with Disk Manager In XP or Part. Magic/Boot Magic for earlier oper. sys.

Sorry about the spelling (Typos), I'm in a hurry.

The cammand is "Make Drive Active". I forgot to tell you this

Command. SORRY!

I'm sorry for the problems with my comunications. I also forgot to tell you that this pertains to partitioning of the drives. "Make Drive Active".