Two separate hard disks: what am I doing wrong?

[Virtual Bart]

Hi there. Here's what I want to do, for the record (if you want to cut to the chase, just skip this paragraph): I want one main system drive with pretty much only the OS in it, then a secondary drive in which I can store my data, media files and whatnot. Like that I should be able to juggle around freely between different VMs as I need them (as in "hey, would this run better on Windows 98 instead of XP? Let's 'plug' it to the W98 VM and find out!")

The problem is I just can't manage to have two hard disks working at the same time. I've tried XP, Vista and 7 so far, both IDE and SATA, master, slave and everything in between, and the furthest I got is for the "new hardware" dialog to pop up, two "Virtual Box Virtual Unit" (the name might have been slightly different) items on the device manager, but still only one hard drive (i.e. the main system drive, C:) on "my computer". Am I missing something here? Am I close? Is there any extra data you need me to provide?

[loukingjr]

Am I missing something here? Am I close? Is there any extra data you need me to provide?

You need to initialize, format and partition the second drive from inside the WIndows guest before it will show up as a drive.

[dlharper]

Have you partitioned and formatted the second hard drive? It won't appear in "My Computer" until you do. In XP and later, do it from "Disk Management". In Win Me and earlier, run Fdisk then Format.

If you are wanting to use different operating systems, then you will need to consider which format you are going to use (NTFS, FAT32, or whatever).

[Virtual Bart]

That seemed to do it. I need to run some tests and mess around some more, but I think I'll be able to do exactly want I intended. Thanks a lot.