XP does not see second hard drive

You said the BIOS sees both of them?  Well try just going into setup and changing the boot drive there.  First boot device, make that HDD 0 on the primary IDE lets say.  The second boot device is HDD 1 on your primary IDE.  Just make sure one drive is slave and one is master (which it appers you already have figured out.)  So all you do is boot between drives.  I suspect you MBR (Master Boot Record) wasn't properly updated to reflect the additional Operating System.  There's really no reason you can't have 2 XP installs and be able to boot to either one.  Boot Magic is a great tool for this if you can get your hands on a copy.

From Device Manager inside Windows do both drives show up as devices? and if so are both 'clean' ie no exclaimation marks or red crosses? If there is a red cross on one make sure it is enabled in the hardware profile.

If both drives are visiable and ok here try the following:-

If you go into Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management and select Disk Management under the Storage tab how many drives do you see?

If you see both what are the drive letters?

Again if you see both are both seen as Healthy (Active).

If you can see both from here might be worth shuffling the drive letter of the one you didnt boot from (you can tell which one is which by renaming the volume one at a time before trying this).

Be interested to hear your results.
Good Luck.

rustyrpage is correct, when you look at the drives under control panel/administrator tools/disc management does the drive show up as hidden when you move the mouse over it? The issue is a conflict with both of the installs. Only 1 of them can be in control so as to avoid problems, one of them is disabled by default. Had you installed the second os with both drives still installed you wouldn't have this problem.

To answer your questions:

1) Are you putting them both on the same IDE channel? YES
If so check the jumper settings on the drives to ensureone is master and the other slave.ALREADY DONE.
Maybe try seperate IDE channels. DOES NOT WORK.

2)Well try just going into setup and changing the boot drive there. DOES NOT WORK.

3)From Device Manager inside Windows do both drives show up as devices? NO
If you go into Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management and select Disk Management under the Storage tab how many drives do you see? ONE

4)when you look at the drives under control panel/administrator tools/disc management does the drive show up as hidden when you move the mouse over it? NO


I have taken the advice of rustyrpage and it seems to have done the trick.
Though it's not the way I would have like it to work.
Now if you have another drive and you want to copy some data quickly
you have to install the second drive and reinstall XP.
Sheeez!!

You cannot have to ACTIVE partition on a same OS. If both HD can start XP separatly, this means both HD have an active partition. To me, bios determine it start on IDE0. XP start and see another operating system with active partition... It might disable the second HD. If you wich to see both HD, I suggest you to use a separate boot loader. This way you're pretty sure to see both...

xThorx
Interesting.
What is a seperate boot loader??

I'm not sure if XP handles these things differently but I was able to put a Win2000 loaded drive onto a system that already had win2000, for the purposes of copying accross data from the older drive, it worked fine. It just saw it as a regular drive, as it should.

I can see no reason why it should be any different in XP.

Is it possible for you to install 2000 on one of the drives?

If so what I would do is install 2000 on the first drive then while both are attached insert your XP CD it will offer you the choice to upgrade or dset up dual boot, choose dual and install XP on the other drive.

This will give you the boot loading.

Ger.

It is a story like this: a boot loader will replace the first bytes of a disk telling which partition/disk you boot from. Normally on IDE 0. The boot loader let you start a system from IDE X / Partition Y of your choice. You can find such boot loader on linux (called LILO), from partition magic, ... But i don't know if there are some which are freeware. I'm pretty sure, you'll be able to boot from one drive and be able to see the second hard disk. The case exposed by meehange is exactly the same. Win2000 (as XP) is able to start different os with theire boot loader.

One thing you can try too is to reinstall xp on your second hard disk but i'm afraid the second installation will install stuff on the first one too (documents and settings folder for sure)... To me, a boot loader is far the best way.

Good luck