Hi all,

Please provide any suggestion about my problem.

I was running windows XP before I installed windows 8 and had two drives. But the problem is that one of the two drives is missing. I am not able to find it, both in the explorer and device manager. If I entered the bios setup when booting, it is there.

Any idea? Thanks.

lany, welcome to the forum!

Going by the info stated in your post, you're running XP (or was). Is that the latest OS that you've successfully ran on it? If so, unless you've done some hardware upgrades (like a video card upgrade), Windows 8 CP isn't going to work out for you. There is a large hardware database for the OS, but XP & the computers built to run it, is some time back.

I certainly hope that you've backed up your computer before this install, if not, you're going to have to reinstall XP. Did you install Windows 8 CP on a separate HDD than XP? If so, there may be tools to rebuild your MBR.

Cat

Win XP and Win 8 Boot Loaders are incompatible. If you are using the Win XP Boot loader it cannot see the Win 8 CP initializing process and believes the Win 8 CP HD is invalid. You must use the Win 8 CP Boot Loader.

I do not know if this is your problem, but if so, you will have to use your Win 8 CP DVD to fix your Win 8 MBR and use this MBR to access both these OS's.

Play around with your drive plugs and make the old XP drive the only one connected to the motherboard and powered up. Then see if it will still boot up the PC.

That's the only way I will run Win-8/CP on my main PC. If one OS can see another OS it can mess around with it, possibly even making it UN-bootable. (No guarantees)

Good Luck,
TechnoMage :cool:

Mini Tool Partition Wizard Home Edition, a free program, offers a bootable disk with tools that may help. There is one that can rebuild the MBR, but the drive containing Windows 8 CP must be removed first. Unless the XP install disk is there & the OP knows what to do with it, that's the best shot that I know of.

The OP's best bet would have been to have backed up the computer first. Had 2 HDD's, so that wouldn't have been a problem, good backup programs are on the net for the giving (Macrium Reflect, Todo 4).

Cat