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Cannot see my old xp harddrive

staton101

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Posted December 26, 2012 at 5:17PM

I have a 3 year old desktop with 250gb harddrive running Windows XP. I have just bought 500gb internal harddrive, swapped the 2 and installed Windows 7 on new drive. When running Win 7, I cannot see the old hardrive in my computer which is installed on the slave connection. I can see it on Bios and devices but it has no drive letter, also unable to assign drive letter as it is greyed out. When booting using XP I can see both drives in my computer. Can anyone help?

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rdave13

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Posted December 26, 2012 at 7:27PM

What dual boot manager do you use? Usually with dual boot only the one in use will be assigned the C: letter.

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rdave13

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Posted December 26, 2012 at 7:43PM

As 7 is selected as the first HDD have a look here. Scroll down to Option two, section 7 (win 7 installed first). That might help. I had to use EasyBCD when dual booting Vista and XP. Both drives were accessible when on Vista or XP. I'm not sure if it helps to change the drive letter and paths in any drive that has an OS.

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rdave13

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Posted December 26, 2012 at 7:52PM

I should have added that if you have a different boot manager then please disregard my advice, except be careful if you tinker with letter and paths with a drive that has an OS on it.

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mgmcc

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Posted December 27, 2012 at 7:56AM

I have a friend with a PC dual booting XP and Windows 7, in his case in separate partitions on the same hard drive. XP sees both partitions but, when booted into Windows 7, the partition with XP is not visible in "Computer". I don't know about 3rd party boot managers but this does seem to be default behaviour with Windows' own boot system. If I remember correctly, in Windows 7 the partition containing XP has no drive letter associated with it in Disk Management.

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staton101

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Posted December 27, 2012 at 9:13AM

Dr yes, I can't add a drive letter because the option is greyed out, I have tried using partion management software but still doesn't help. Rdave13, I just used the bios to change the boot sequence to force it to load with either xp or win7,

I just wanted to be able to access all my files from the old drive while running win7. Think I will boot xp and copy all the stuff I want to new drive, then format old drive as I don't really need xp anymore... Thanks for your help so far.

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nickf

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Posted December 27, 2012 at 9:26AM

If that's all you want to do , just use windows easy transfer . I have used it a few times , works well , and is quite quick

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