XP Reinstall won't recognize HD

[huypham]

I apologize for the long post, but I've been staring at this problem for about 8 straight hours.

I run a Athlon 2600+ on a Biostar M7NCD, which is a Nforce2 chipset. I have 2 HDDs, a 30 gig Maxtor and a 400 gig Seagate. I had both running in Windows XP.

I reformatted the 30 gig HD and installed Windows XP. The 400 gig HDD is recognized in Disk Managment but as "unallocated". I installed SP2 in hopes that it would help, but to no avail.

I tried to fdisk /mbr to no avail. I checked jumpers and set the HDD to master and removed the attached cd rom, but still no luck.

When I run Partition Magic, it tells me that the 400 gig HD has a corrupt EZ-Drive and needs to be re-installed. I booted with Seagate's installation CD, but it could not find any overlay program.

However, all my files still exist as mentioned in File Scavenger, a free file recovery tool.

Anybody know how I can get XP to recognize my HD?

Thanks for the help! I appreciate it.

Huy

 

[huypham]

Addendum: I have tried both the Microsoft IDE drivers and the Nforce2 IDE drivers.

 

[birdpup]

Were the motherboard chipset drivers installed?
Is the 400GB drive recognized in the bios?
What is the significance of the "corrupt EZ-Drive"? What is the EZ-Drive?
What is an "overlay program"?

It may help to test the drive with Seagate's diagnostic utility.
"unallocated" recognition in Disk Management may mean the partition table has been corrupted.

In Disk Management, try the "Rescan Disks" option in the Action menu.

In Disk Management, open the Help utility from the Help menu, in the Contents tab, select Disk Management, Troubleshooting, and follow the options for "A basic disk's status is Not Initialized".

It may help to try the following:

1. run some Windows level commands such as CHKDSK, CHKNTFS, RECOVER, or "SCANDISK C: /AUTOFIX /SURFACE",
2. partition Table Doctor to attempt to rebuild the partition table