Missing Hard Drive

[sawildcat]

I have 2 HD's in my computer (just reloaded XP Pro) it only sees 1 HD, BIOS shows both, even device manager shows both, but in "my computer", there is only 1??? what gives? I tried uninstalling & reinstalling in device manager but still nothing except the primary one in "My Computer" both have been in the computer for awhile & they showed up fine before I did a re-install of XP Pro.


Any Ideals?

 

[davidmcolaco]

Go to control panel, then to the administrative tools and then to computer managment and then go to the disk managment and check if both disks are there and if they have partitions created and formatted.
Probably your hard disk has no partition created and because of that it won't appear in my computer.

David

 

[sawildcat]

Thats what I was afraid of, for some reason it doesn't see the partition that is there. It shows the drive & says its healthy, but shows no File System. I have all my back-up info on this, and it worked fine before I reloaded the other hard drive. I reloaded twice to see if it was that was the problem. Go figure, my back up messes up when I go to retrieve it. Is there any programs that could retrieve that info for me?, like a undelete or partition magic. I know if I repartition it I will lose everything, If I haven't all ready.

Any help would be appriceated.

 

[rvnguy]

sawildcat,

Sorry, that you are experiencing problems. I suggest that you attempt to repair the drive before giving up on it. The file table could be corrupt, crosslinked or ???
It depends largely on how the drive was formatted FAT or NTFS?
If FAT, fdisk will be capable of dicerning if there is a partition assigned.

for either; chkdsk will check for errors and if found
"chkdsk /r" will repair them.

And yes if you have a third party app like "Partition Magic" I would try their procedures for your type of problem.

Drive manufacturers also have utilities to assist in keeping their drives functioning and either come with the drive CD or are downloadable from their sites.

Take care not to write to this drive until you have tried all possible means of getting back your information.

Hope this helps

rvnguy

"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[Freestone]

sawildcat

Did you have a program called GoBack installed prior to your reinstall of XP? If so, reinstall it.

Others have reported very favorably on the data recovery program GetDataBack at

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

 

[sawildcat]

FREESTONE, That prog is doing it, thanks for the info, this prog kicks a$$. Costs a bit but it works.

 

[sawildcat]

and thanks to davidmcolaco & rvnguy, I appriceate your help also. every little bit I learn helps. I purchased a 15 pack of DVD+RW, that will be my primary back-up now.