I’ve spent today fitting two hardrives (20.4 gig + 4.7 gig) via a data transfer card a bought a couple of years ago but never used. The card is an Ultra ATA-100 (transfers 100mb/sec) anyway this didn't turn out to be straight forward I can see the 4.7 gig no problem, but I can't see the 20.4 gig drive unless I go into safe mode. The 20.4 gig drive was taken off my old win 98 machine some years back it is full of my past work I want to be able to check to see what I need from this drive. Anyone got any ideas to why this drive won't show? The drive was in good working order. Running win XP home

MB

If the 20.4 GB HDD with WinXP installed has an NTFS formatted partition it can not be seen by Win9x OS's; you need to slave the drive to a HDD with an OS installed that can see NTFS partitions [WinXP].

I haven't explained this properly - I have a P4 with an 80 gig hardrive with XP home installed. All motherboard IDEs are full (CD writer + DVD writer + DVD reader + 80 gig hardrive) I want to ADD two hardrives (20.4 gig + 4.7 gig)
which were off my old redundant win 98 computer. The only solution I could come up with was to fit a PCI IDE expansion card.

but I can't see the 20.4 gig drive unless I go into safe mode.
That sounds a bit weird.

Do you see it in the Controller's BIOS (presumably yes), Device Manager, Disk Management (run diskmgmt.msc) and My Computer??

certainly sounds a bit weird alright.

Do you see it in the Controller's BIOS (presumably yes),
YES

Device Manager
Yes

Disk Management
(run diskmgmt.msc)
NO

and My Computer??
No

The only solution I could come up with was to fit a PCI IDE expansion card.This solution is a bit complex. If these hard drives are going to be permanent residents in your P4 system, then we can certainly get them working. But if you only want to hook them up temporarily for back-ups, rip out two of your optical drives and put the two hard drives in their place. Then just put the optical drives back when you're done.

Could the problem be due to having 2 C: drives?

The only references I have come across with safe mode seeing drives and normal mode not seeing them has been related to BIOS limitations. Could the controller card be limited in this way - even though one would think it unlikely. Can you identify the exact card being used?