Solved Win 7 won't see secondary IDE HDD

Hey All,

I've recently built a new computer, but I want to use the same IDE HDD as my old computer. However, when I try to boot into Windows XP I get a BSOD. After some searching I found that this was due to incompatible motherboard drivers.

I want to save my current files to a different hard drive before I do a fresh install with Windows 7, so I tried to put the IDE HDD in my other machine. This machine is currently running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on a SATA 500GB drive.

My problem is this: When I enter the BIOS I can see both hard drives, but all I can do is decide which to boot from; the XP or the Win 7 one. If I load up Win 7 I am unable to see the XP drive, so I can't copy my files over for backup.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Chrosominop

Open disk management in W7 - See if the drive you want is set to Active -

I'd just use an external USB hdd - Or a flash drive (cheap now)

Thanks for the reply.

I did do that, and windows was unable to read the drive. It saw it, but I had no option to assign a drive letter or anything. I think something with the original windows xp partition got messed up, because the only thing that has been able to read it is the original installation.

I ended up transferring all important files by usb and then doing a complete wipe of the drive. Computer is up and running great!

Cheers.