I recently purchased a soundblaster audigy LS, installed the card and after the initial reboot, my computer slowed drastically. Upon windows restarting, i discovered that my second hard drive was no longer showing in "My Computer". It is still seen in device manager, showing that its working correctly, but its not even being seen in "Disc Management" either. Bios sees it as well. I figured that maybe something went wrong during the installation of the new sound card, so i removed the sound card, still no progress. Tried re-formatting and re-installing windows xp, during the set-up process, in the stage where you select which drive you want to install it to, it recognized the second drive, but showed it as un-accessible. So, i finished the install and still no progress. I tried switching cables, changing primary to master, vise-versa, still nothing. Anyone have any ideas as to what i could possibly do? Or should i just throw it away, i have quite a few family photos that i never backed up and would like to save. Also, after i disconnected the drive all together my computer ran at proper speed once again.
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Un-Accessible Hard Drive...
- Thread starter doc1975
- Start date
Have you another machine you can try the drive in?
You could download diagnostic utlity from manufacturer's website to check drive out.
(Is it fat32 or ntfs - if fat32, can you see it booting from 98 boot floppy - if you haven't one? If ntfs, could try same, but with ntfsdos from - makes ntfs readable from bootdisk).
You could download diagnostic utlity from manufacturer's website to check drive out.
(Is it fat32 or ntfs - if fat32, can you see it booting from 98 boot floppy - if you haven't one? If ntfs, could try same, but with ntfsdos from - makes ntfs readable from bootdisk).
It may just be that your slave drive caved co-incidentally at the same time your audigy was installed. It doesn't sound too good, but I would certainly go with wolluf's suggestion of trying it on another computer and see if it'll come up.
The drive may now be flaky, so be prepared to back it up if you do see it on your box or another. You may only ever get one chance at recovery, so be sure you're set up to do a complete backup when you try the drive.
Les Gray
The drive may now be flaky, so be prepared to back it up if you do see it on your box or another. You may only ever get one chance at recovery, so be sure you're set up to do a complete backup when you try the drive.
Les Gray
You are probably experiencing a common harddisk failure. Possibly the platter isn't spinning, remove the drive from the case while leaving it connected, fire-up your PC and use a screwdriver as a stethoscope by placing the handle against your ear. If it is spinning you will hear it, if it isn’t then torque it with your wrist or smack it from the side until it spins-up. If this doesn’t work go to step 2.
Place the harddrive in a normal plastic bag (NOT antistatic) with a loose data-cable and a loose power extender cable connected and extending from the bag. Seal the bag once you have pushed out the extra air and stick it in the freezer compartment of the fridge. In the morning you will likely have a drive that is functional for 3-5 minutes so quickly connect the data and power cable without placing the drive inside the case. Fire-up and start copying directories in order of importance. I have rescued a lot of data this way over the past 20 years but you often only get one shot at it.
Place the harddrive in a normal plastic bag (NOT antistatic) with a loose data-cable and a loose power extender cable connected and extending from the bag. Seal the bag once you have pushed out the extra air and stick it in the freezer compartment of the fridge. In the morning you will likely have a drive that is functional for 3-5 minutes so quickly connect the data and power cable without placing the drive inside the case. Fire-up and start copying directories in order of importance. I have rescued a lot of data this way over the past 20 years but you often only get one shot at it.
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