Hard Drive Problems

commiealex · Post by **commiealex** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 1:33 am

Anyone know how I can make my second hard drive visible to WinXP WIHTOUT fomatting it? It shows up in Device Manager, but not explorer.

My primary hard drive died, and I had to reinstall Windows on a new one, and keep the secondary hard drive as secondary.

Any help is appreciated, but if someone mentions jumpers again, I am gonna go jump into a lake and drown myself.

Sol Ano · Post by **Sol Ano** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 1:38 am

what does it say in your BIOS?

and it might actually be your jumper settings, if you have changed the position of the drives on your cable.

*listens carefully for a loud splashing sound*

commiealex · Post by **commiealex** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 1:44 am

*lots of bubbles coming up at the surface of a lake, sometimes forming coherent words*

BIOS sees it, Device manager sees it, both are labeled properly as master and slave in BIOS. When I open up disk manager, it shows the drive being completly unallocated space, but I know for sure the whole thing is an NTFS partition.

I tried some data recovery programs, and they see all the files on my hard drive, they just want around $1000(US) to recover those documents for me. I've been beating my head against this for 2 days now, and am at a complete loss

Sol Ano · Post by **Sol Ano** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 2:24 am

Have you tried running scandisk on it? If it's something like a corrupted FAT (File Allocation Table) or if scandisk won't fix it, then likelihood is you won't get those files back without the aforementioned data recovery programs. Cheaper alternative might be to take the disk to a decent geek shop and get them to recover the files for you. Would cost some $ but a lot less than buying your own program...

But wait on this thread a while, someone with more tech ken might give some more pointers...

Harold Holdfast · Post by **Harold Holdfast** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 5:06 pm

IIRC, you need a partition for it to show up as a valid drive. Doesn't matter if the partition is formatted.

commiealex · Post by **commiealex** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 8:23 pm

So, if I partition a part of it, with that let me see the rest of the files on the disk, or just the new partition?

Melthavion · Post by **Melthavion** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 11:56 pm

For WinXP Pro (maybe home too, I deal mainly with Pro), go to your admin tools, open "computer management", chose "storage" then "disk management" from the tree at the left. This should leave you with a list of storage devices at the top of the right half of the computer management window, and a detail list for each one below that. If the second drive is formatted and installed right it should show up on this list. Right click on the entry for the second drive and make sure it's mounted and try assigning it a drive letter there if it doesn't have one...

commiealex · Post by **commiealex** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 12:01 am

Thanks for the help everyone, but since none of those things worked, I decided to download an illegal copy of a file recovery program Kazaa, and now all is fine. Thanks a lot, guys.

Trinny · Post by **Trinny** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 9:04 am

Not sure about this, and now you've fixed it it's not that relevant, but I think the problem may have been that XP etc.. switched to using HPFS rather than NTFS?

or somthin', ?

LoFang · Post by **LoFang** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 9:31 am

XP still uses NTFS :)