HDD not recognized by XP

[jscottm]

I have an XP system with 2 hard disks. The 2nd disk which was my d: drive and used as a data drive, had personal financial and tax data on it that I no longer needed. Being the paranoid person that I tend to be, I decided to completely wipe the drive clean and start fresh with it. I used one of those disk wipe programs that boots the system from a floppy and makes multiple passes to completely wipe everything off from the drive. I think it was called a Gutmann method and wiped the drive with 35 passes. After completing this, I rebooted the system. The drive is no longer recognized. It has no letter designation. I guess all formatting has been wiped off it as well. Perhaps even low level formating (whatever that is). When I go into device manager, however, this particular drive is correctly recognized with no errors. It says the device is working properly. My question is, what must I do to put this drive back into operation. I mean I know I'll have to reformat and repartition the drive but how to do this when I cant very well tell my computer to format drive d: or whatever, when according to "my computer" this drive isnt seen. Any help gladly accepted and most appreciated. BTW, if you could keep your response as non-technical as possible as Im not very computer savvy at all.

Thanks

 

[Freestone]

While in XP, you have to use Disk Management to partition and format the drive. Invoke it from the Computer Management console or via Start, Run..., diskmgmt.msc

Note when using XP to create a FAT32 volume, the maximum partition size is 32GB. NTFS doesn't have this restriction.

 

[Prydonian]

You were halfway there. Go into device manager, right click on the drive and select format. The format dialog box will permit you to select a drive letter as well as other format options.

If you're not familiar with formatting, select "D" as your drive letter, NTFS as the format and for all the reset, take the defaults. Be patient. A 200GB drive, for example, could take 30 minutes or more to format.

Mike, The IT Guy.

Life is too short to drink warm beer....

 

[Prydonian]

Sorry, Freestone.... I didn't see your reply and then went and told him to do the same thing you did! Must be bed time.... (Yawn)

Mike, The IT Guy

Life is too short to drink warm beer....