seth wrote:
> i have a strange problem with xp and my additional drive i recently bought.
>
> i was running vista for a while and just couldn't deal with it anymore
> so decided to go back to xp.
>
> i have the original 250gb drive and added a 1tb drive. when i installed
> xp it saw the 1tb drive as D and worked fine. i started to install my
> drivers, first with the latest nvidia drivers for my video. it
> installed fine, but after the reboot i nearly freaked out when D was
> gone. it didn't see the drive at all. subsequent reboots did not show
> the drive in device manager at all. i started over again with fresh xp
> install and after it finished D was there again. i installed sp3 and
> after the reboot, D was again gone. i installed xp a third time and D
> was there. this time i did nothing except a reboot and again D was gone.
>
> one thing that's interesting, every time the system would boot after the
> initial install finished and D wouldn't appear, the boot process took
> excessively long (nearly 5 min). i can't make sense of it. if it was a
> matter of xp never seeing the drive, i can see the possibility of a
> driver isse, 48 bit lba support etc. but when the drive can't be seen
> after the second boot following initial install, that doesn't make too
> much sense to me (bios always sees the drive).
>
> i ended up going back to vista (for now) and no issues accessing the 1tb
> drive.
> system is hp pavilion a1630n purchased end of 2006.
>
> any ideas why this could be happening?

Just a guess (I don't use Vista), but perhaps this KB article has a
clue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931760/en-us

"Windows Vista and Windows PE 2.0 create disk partitions differently
than Windows XP. This problem occurs only on computers that use certain
BIOS firmware."

I haven't heard of an incompatibility between XP and disks partitioned
using Vista, but maybe there's something about very large drives ...

--
Lem -- MS-MVP

To the moon and back with 2K words of RAM and 36K words of ROM.
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