WinXP Pro Clean Installation/Question

Question

I have a spare 120Gb WD HD so I decided to make a clean WinXP installation on this drive. To this effect I removed the main OS drive from my PC (also a 120Gb WD HD as seen in my system description below) and replaced it with the spare one, keeping all other components with no change (I have as seen below a 2nd 250Gb WD hard drive installed).  I inserted the WinXP Pro Installation disk, booted from it and proceeded with installation, previously deleting the partition, creating one and formatting.Installation went smooth but when I went to MY COMPUTER in the freshly installed WinXP only drive C showed up (the 2nd HD didn't show up). So I went to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Disk Management and Disk 1 (the 2nd HD) was labeled UNREADABLE having dynamic format. When I clicked on it the system promted 'Convert to Basic?' (the main OS drive is labeled as having Basic format). At that point I was afraid of giving it OK and running the risk of losing my 2nd HD's data, so I chose to power off the system and return to my original OS drive. When I checked MY COMPUTER  the 2ndHD showed up as expected without problem. My question is: If I want to make the 2nd HD show up in MY COMPUTER and readable in my freshly installed WinXP, should I convert to Basic when prompted in Disk Management? Is this a safe operation? Or else how shuld I do this? Thanks for your help.

alegator · Answer

Yes, I thought so and I read a similar article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. So then what can I do to make the 2nd HD readable? Is it possible that this is happening due to the fact that I haven't installed SP1 yet?

amaretto · Answer

If you convert it back to Basic, you'll lose all the data in that disk. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;309044

Windows General

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