Missing drive letter...

[markdmac]

This evening I helped a friend update his PC. He was running Windows 2000 Pro on a PC about 5 years old.

We upgraded motherboard, CPU & memory and moved his 80GB drive to be a slave and installed a new 500GB drive as the master.

I purchased and installed Vista Home Premium for him. Vista installed without a problem onto the C drive. But when I go into Windows Explorer, the old hard drive is not listed. A quick visit to Disk Manager shows the second drive but there is no drive letter assigned and the right click choice for selecting a drive is grayed out. The only right click choice on the drive is to Delete the volume.

As it stands now I cannot access all the user data and my friend is likely to kill me if anything happened to it since I told him we would install on the new drive and leave the old one alone. The drive shows as being a basic disk in disk manager. Can anyone please suggest how I can get this drive to assign a drive letter and give me access to the data?

One of the things that scares the heck out of me is that the old drive shows up with the File System type as blank. Someone please give me hope.

I used this same upgrade method on my own system with not problems. Hopefully someone can suggest something.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[HalComps]

it could well be that the 2 HDD are not compatable. this is a common issue with HDDs also look in the bios and see if its being detected there. you might have to use the old one as master and get any data off it you need. or try getting a HDD same as your old one, might be harder than thought, as the older HDDs might not be avaliable no more.

 

[markdmac]

Yes, my plan today is to swap which is master and see if I can access both, move data and swap them back. Once I have the data I can reformat the original. I am just concerend that the Vista install somehow wiped the partition without my knowledge.

Both drives are adetected in the BIOS.

 

[Freestone]

Was the old 2000 drive formatted as NTFS? If so, there have been numerous reports on the forums here where users of NTFS formatted volumes either reformatted their system partition or placed the drive in another XP machine only to find their NTFS partitions seemed to have disappeared. The only resolution to this phenomenon so far is use of a data recovery applications such as GetDataBack. I know you said Vista was installed, but ...

Another gotcha is the case where users had GoBack installed on their system then reformatted the system drive, and voila, all other partitions have been "lost".

I'm not sure either case applies to you, Mark, but thought I'd bring these cases to your attention.

 

[linney]

Is there any sign of the second hard drive in the Bios, any Bios update available, is the Bios set to use Safe Defaults?

Diskpart (alive and well in Vista)

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...95fa-4faf-95bc-2d5345f4a57a1033.mspx?mfr=true

An example of its use (although slightly erroneous) can be found here,
XP System Partition is NOT drive C:
thread779-641371

 

[mattey123]

i know i had this problem with my dvd-rw drive, there's a program you can download that clears something and makes the drive appear in my computer again. If i remember what it is i'll let you know.

 

[linney]

Was that TweakUI your thinking of? I don't think there is a Vista version available?

Most of those programs use this type of Tweak, but I don't think that would be relevant on a Clean Install of Vista.

Hiding Drives.

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/1157/

 

[markdmac]

Freestone, I do believe they had GoBack installed.

I am currently running a scan using a data recovery tool. Hopefully it iwll be able to recover the data.

 

[linney]

This mentions problems and workarounds with the "GoBack" software.

To GoBack or SystemRestore !
thread779-928674

 

[markdmac]

Problem solved. My friend was using Norton GoBack which changes the MBR. Setting the drive back to primary allowed me to remove the GoBack configuration and I could then access the disk after switching it back. Quite a scare, but all is well. Some details on the problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330140/en-us.

Thanks for your attempts to help, they were very much appreciated.

Regards,

Mark

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[Freestone]

Thanks for posting back Mark. I used the word "lost" in quotes in my earlier post when mentioning GoBack, but failed to mention that the partition(s) weren't really lost and required either a GoBack install or GoBack removal. I am glad you were able to take the next steps and resolve your dilemma. And also thanks for posting the Microsoft KB pointer. That should prove handy in the future too.