hard drive not showing up.

[alidabiri]

hi folks.
i recently purchased a new hard drive (80 gig) and installed it as d: drive on my win-98se pc. i copied all my data from c: drive onto this d: drive. a couple of weeks ago, i had some problem with the pc (pentium II - 400mhz) and i re-formatted my c: drive and re-installed win-98se. i didn't touch the d: drive at all. after installation completed, my d: drive is not showing up. at western digital's web site, it says the "pc freezing" may be related to upgrade of bios (being old and not handling above 32 gig). i like to find out if there's anyway i can get drive d: to show up and to get my valued data from that drive. i know in win-xp somehow you can go to "computer" / management and find the drive.

 

[edfair]

When you did the original install of the large drive did you use a drive overlay program to make it usable?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[alidabiri]

i used western digital util program (datalifeguard) to install it. and it worked for about 2 weeks. i copied all my data from c: to it. the bios knows it is there, the util program knows it's there, but it just doesn't show up under explorer and "mycomputer" as a drive.

 

[edfair]

Suspect that the program you used originally put something on the original installation that made it visible.
If so, the only way to make it visible again would be to run the install again. Just don't let it format the drive again.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[alidabiri]

the problem is that the util program won't install it unless you let it fdisk or format the drive. i am searching another way. like how do the data recovery people do it?

 

[wolluf]

overlay software is a pain in the proverbial (I know its a bit late, but should never use it IMO - because of scenarios like yours).

Suggestions

- if you've access to another machine which can see whole 80GB without overlay software - could try loading it there as slave and see if data recovery app can retrieve your data.

- with disclaimer! You could let datalifeguard partition and format the disk again, and then use a data recovery app (as partition/format shouldn't be destructive of data on the drive)

but no idea if data recovery apps work on overlaid drives.