Having trouble with a newly installed HDD

Darkewolfe

I've been running out of space lately and also just got a shiny copy of Windows 7, so I bought a new HDD. I was hoping to be as lazy as possible by putting in the new HDD, hereafter referred to as X, formatting it with Win7 and then keeping the other HDD, referred to as C, as a WinXP install. I would then leisurely transfer over what files I wanted to keep from C to X and either keep OS's so that I could boot into XP when some software wasn't quite Win7 supporting.

So, first steps first, I install X, initialize it through XP's disk management and format it as a partition. Then I try just running the windows 7 disk, but it looks like it wants to reformat X and C together for some reason. So I shut down, unplug the C drive so as to avoid accidentally reformatting it, and boot from the Windows 7 DVD. For some reason when I start up the Win7 set-up, it refuses to find the X drive, or identify it as a drive I can install on. I'm not sure what to do next, so I restart again, this time with the C drive hooked up so that I boot into XP. Now when I go into disk manager it's not even showing X anymore (which should show as a 1TB drive) but a partition named F with 32MB of space on it. I'm not even sure whether F is physically located on the C or X drives.

Halp?

End

Does your 1TB show up under the bios?

Darkewolfe

I didn't check before leaving for work, but I was assuming that if XP could see it to format in disk manager then the BIOS were recognizing it as well.

End

It sounds like X might not be showing up anymore, right? Since you didn't know where F is located?

Although, in the Disk Manager, I thought Disk F should show up on the same "row" as the disk it is on.

Darkewolfe

D'oh. I didn't think to look for that, but if memory serves I think the random F drive was showing up on the same row as C. I can't check right now because this is my home system we're discussing, but when I do look, what will be my first step if X isn't showing up in the BIOS? What will be my first step if it is?

The Windows 7 setup disk, when run from inside XP with both drives attached, originally gave me the option to format both drives with 7. If it still does that I may just try manually backing up anything I don't have backed-up already and doing a full format. I was hoping to be lazy and avoid that, though.

End

If X isn't showing up in the BIOS, we may have to worry about the hardware side of things. Some BIOSes are tricky though (you may need to tell it to recheck manually).

If it gets that far, hopefully it's just a "Did you plug it in all the way?" or something like that.

Darkewolfe

Alright, finally got it working after messing around. I plugged the X drive into the C drive's motherboard slot. I suspect that my mobo might have built in m/s settings for certain spots or something.

New question: if I have both HDD's hooked up at the same time, one with XP and one with 7, I am given to believe that windows will detect this and ask me which I want to boot into. Is that correct, or will I just have to go through the BIOS to swap between which boots?

LoveIsUnity

Are you running SATA drives or IDE drives? You will determine which gets priority depending on how you've hooked up the drives to your motherboard in both setups, but we can give you more specific instructions if we know what type of setup you have.

Darkewolfe

They're both hooked up via SATA.