Separate Hdd dual boot, one OS not showing 3rd storage HDD

I did a dual boot install of WinXP & Win7 on separate HDDs. Steps that I followed: I unplugged all HDDs except one which I installed a slipstreamed version of WinXP with AHCI driver. I then plugged in SDD drive and installed Win7 with AHCI driver during F6 option thru USB flash. I finished by plugging in a 3rd HDD storage drive already formatted (Has files on it). I turned the computer on and got the boot screen asking which version of windows I would like to run. Everything has been running great , doesn't seem to be any MBR issues so far.
Now for the problem......MY Computer shows the following.

Win7 OS
C: Win7......on Samsung SDD
D: WinXP....on Western Digital HDD
F: Storage...on Seagate Barracuda HDD

WinXP OS
C: WinXP......on Western Digital HDD
E: Win7.....on Samsung SDD

Win7 shows all 3 drives, but WinXP does not show Seagate Barracuda storage HDD. It shows in Device Manager, but not Dick Management or MY Computer.

Would appreciate any help


Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 Rev. 3.0……….….MB
AMD FX-8350………………………….….CPU
2 Mushkin Silverline 992074 8GB…… ….Memory
Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB… ..HDD - Storage
Western Digital WD2003FZEX 2TB….…..HDD – Win XP Pro 32Bit
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB………………....SDD – Win 7 Pro 64Bit
Seasonic M12II-650 ATX 650 Watt………..Power Supply
MSI Nvidia Geforce 660 TF 2GBD5/OC…..Video Card

Golden said:

How is it Barrcuda 3TB formatted - MBR or GPT? XP doesn't natively recognise GPT formatted disks.

To be honest I don't know. A small local computer store built it for me. It was already formatted, I just started saving files to it.
I then went and bought the Western Digital WD2003FZEX, connected it and installed XP on it. How would I be able to tell how it was formatted?

AddRAM said:

XP may not see a 3 TB drive, there was no such thing in the XP days.

As Golden hinted at, it should be initialized as a MBR drive and partitioned and each partition formatted in NTFS.

Why would I partition a storage HDD, I'm using all of it's space for one thing? I didn't create a partition on the Win7 or WinXP drives either, never do. Isn't NTFS formatting just for operating systems, I don't know, just always thought.
Okay, I'm going to shut down now and open Win7, go into Disk Management to see if shows the type of formatting....I shall return.

Okay, here is a screen shot from Wn7 Disk Management. It does show as NTFS file system, whether the drive was installed using a AHCI driver for MBR installation I don't know.

Golden said:

XP cannot see a single large volume of that size......in order to see it in XP, you need to format it to smaller NTFS partitions under the MBR scheme.

Until you do, XP will never see that drive.

New thing i learn from Golden... Thank you so much..

Golden said:

Xp4me said:

Why would I partition a storage HDD, I'm using all of it's space for one thing?

XP cannot see a single large volume of that size......in order to see it in XP, you need to format it to smaller NTFS partitions under the MBR scheme.

Until you do, XP will never see that drive.

So I'll have to install a boot loader onto a HDD that's not running an OS?

Is there a way to hide the boot loader in case I do a Select All-Delete at some point?

Will doing this mess up my dual boot MBR that's already set up and working?

While searching for tutorials I keep seeing that MBR won't work with drives over 2.2 TB./something about having to use a diskwizard driver. I don't care about wasted space as long as I have a 2TB partition for storage. Maybe I can throw the boot loader on the 2nd partition with no drive letter so it never even gets seen, therefor never getting deleted......if that's possible.