2nd HDD not showing up

R

Rzrseg

New Member
Hey all,

I'm running Window XP Pro and have two physical HDD's. "C" for the OS and "F" for all my data. I wiped and reloaded my C drive and now my F isn't showing in My Computer.

Background and things I've tried.
- It shows in the BIOS as a Hard drive
- It does not show in the BIOS as a boot option (no idea if that's important, but I thought it was odd)
- It shows in the Disk Management as Healthy and Active (NTFS).
- In the Disk Management, it is named "Main Drive" with no letter. When I right click on it, the option to Change Drive letter is greyed out. The only options that are live are Delete Partition and Help.
- It does not show up in the Disk Defragmenter
- The C drive is hooked up with a regular IDE cable
- The F drive is hooked up with a SATA cable.
- I've turned the computer off, unplugged the SATA cable and restarted the computer. Shut it all down, plugged the SATA cable back in and it didn't help.
- It is not hooked up as a RAID array.
- There are not any 'issues' in the Device Manager
- It shows up in the Device Manager as healthy and happy.

I've come across this before...probably the last time I did this, but I can't remember what directions were give to me to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated (and written down this time ).

It's a real stumper.

Thanks,
David
 
Apparently you forgot to see all board drivers like those for the onboard sata controllers reinstalled again following the wipe of the main OS drive. If you did see those go on take a trip into the device manager and look under the "disk drives" catagory for the sata drive.

Simply right click on that there and select the uninstall option and restart the system. Windows should perform a fresh detection and then see the drive installed at that time.
 
Apparently you forgot to see all board drivers like those for the onboard sata controllers reinstalled again following the wipe of the main OS drive.
Click to expand...
You do realise that the drive wouldn't appear even in disk management if drivers were the problem?
- It shows in the Disk Management as Healthy and Active (NTFS).
- In the Disk Management, it is named "Main Drive"...
...
- There are not any 'issues' in the Device Manager
- It shows up in the Device Manager as healthy and happy.
Click to expand...

When I right click on it, the option to Change Drive letter is greyed out. The only options that are live are Delete Partition and Help.
Click to expand...
That's weird. This only happens to me when I right click on my Linux-partitions (but they're reported as unknowns anyway...)

Also, it should not be reported as "Active" unless you're booting off it. If the SATA drive appears as "Active", you've apparently installed Windows on it by accident, or even if you Windows installation is on the IDE drive the bot loader has found its way on the SATA drive...

I would just unplug the SATA drive, do a repair install so that the boot loaders & whatnot changes will be written on the IDE drive and then plug the SATA drive back in. Make sure that the IDE drive is set as the primary boot device, though, so that the boot data on the SATA disc won't be used. See if that does anything...
 
hackapelite said:
Also, it should not be reported as "Active" unless you're booting off it. If the SATA drive appears as "Active", you've apparently installed Windows on it by accident, or even if you Windows installation is on the IDE drive the bot loader has found its way on the SATA drive...

I would just unplug the SATA drive, do a repair install so that the boot loaders & whatnot changes will be written on the IDE drive and then plug the SATA drive back in. Make sure that the IDE drive is set as the primary boot device, though, so that the boot data on the SATA disc won't be used. See if that does anything...
Click to expand...
Bah, dang it! I thought you had it there. I did a Repair Install and when I plugged it in and re-started the computer (after shutting it down from a complete boot up without the SATA drive plugged in) the window popped up saying that it had found and installed the SATA drive (a WD 120Gb). However, it's the same as before. In Disk Manager with no live options but Delete Partition and not in My Computer.
 
A smart poster always "reads everything" in a post before making any comment.
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Exactly! There's no point in suggesting drivers may be the problem when they clearly aren't.

@OP - A little change to my intructions, in Disk Management right-click the IDE drive (where the OS is supposed to be installed), and hit "Mark as Active". AFAIK that should do the trick as well.
 
First of all even if the sata drive had been left plugged in the Windows installer would have placed the boot information on the ide drive by default. Even with Vista seeing a better hardware detection process ide will over ride sata since the installer will look for the first ide drive.

Now that the repair install readily detected the drive but it still isn't appearing in MyComputer go into the device manager and right click on the drive. This time however you are going to choose the update driver option to see if Windows will complete the installation by automatically providing or searching for the drivers it will install for you.
 
Windows installer would have placed the boot information on the ide drive by default.
Click to expand...
ide will over ride sata since the installer will look for the first ide drive.
Click to expand...
This largely depends on your BIOS settings. If you set your SATA devices over IDE as primary in BIOS, windows will install to the SATA device by default. Many newer computers have SATA devices set as default in BIOS, now that SATA drives have become mainstream.
This time however you are going to choose the update driver option to see if Windows will complete the installation by automatically providing or searching for the drivers it will install for you.
Click to expand...
I still can't see how the drivers would be a problem here, but whatever. Let the OP try it and see if it works.

@OP - did you do the "mark the partition as active" thing (the SATA drive was marked as active, correct? You want the IDE drive to be active)?

Also... I assume that the SATA drive contains only one, large partition (NTFS), correct?
 
No Joy

Allrighty then.

Driver Update: Tried it, it just said that the one's I have are as good as it gets.

hackapelite said:
@OP - did you do the "mark the partition as active" thing (the SATA drive was marked as active, correct? You want the IDE drive to be active)?
Click to expand...
Tried to do it but that option was greyed out for the C drive.

Also... I assume that the SATA drive contains only one, large partition (NTFS), correct?
Click to expand...
You assume correctly.

I've attached link to what the Disk Manager looks like.http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3210/2891246884_daa2103412_o.jpg
 
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Awww

Aww man, nothing else from anyone? This problem is solveable, I've had it before, I just can't remember what I did to make it go away.

Anyone? :)
 
It seems as if you're computer is seeing your SATA drive as an active partition, and I'm pretty sure if Windows thinks a partition is an active one it won't let you change the drive letter. Since Windows won't even allow you the option of formatting your SATA HD, I recommend downloading this Partition Manager. It's free and it might allow you to format and/or select a drive letter for your hard drive. If that doesn't work then you might need to tweak your Registry. Hope this helps.
 
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Yogi32 said:
It's free and it might allow you to format and/or select a drive letter for your hard drive. If that doesn't work then you might need to tweak your Registry. Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
Hi Yogi, I thought you had it there! I downloaded it and it did give me the option to change the drive letter. However, when I try to Apply the changes, it gives me an error and says "Mounting Volume Failed". Any thoughts?

What were you saying about the registry?
 
Aw too bad that didnt work!
Ah yes, the registry. I dont exactly know the whole registry process for this particular problem but I do know if you..
Go to "Run"
Type in "regedit" and click OK
Go under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Then under SYSTEM
In the folder "MountedDevices" it has a list of mounted devices and I believe there is a way to edit those but like I said before, I've never done it so if you wanna go that route you could try to google the answer.

Now, if you dont wanna do that, the next thing I would suggest would be to download a free data recovery tool such as PC Inspector File Recovery just to see if it will detect the partition. If it does detect it, then copy all data from the drive to your other drive. Then you'd be able to go back to disk management and select "Delete Partition" and then proceed to repartition/reformat it. Then go back and move the recovered data back onto the drive.
Whew.
Let me know what happens.
 
Yogi32 said:
Aw too bad that didnt work!
Ah yes, the registry. I dont exactly know the whole registry process for this particular problem but I do know if you..
Go to "Run"
Type in "regedit" and click OK
Go under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Then under SYSTEM
In the folder "MountedDevices" it has a list of mounted devices and I believe there is a way to edit those but like I said before, I've never done it so if you wanna go that route you could try to google the answer.
Click to expand...
Tried this...but it didn't seem to want to play. It actually had an F: drive as mounted (I do believe that's the missing hard drive..A: C:, a CD drive (D: ) and DVD Drive (E: )..leaving the 2nd hard drive as F: ) so I coudn't 'rename' anything. I did actually re-name it but that didn't help (or change) anything.

Now, if you dont wanna do that, the next thing I would suggest would be to download a free data recovery tool such as PC Inspector File Recovery just to see if it will detect the partition. If it does detect it, then copy all data from the drive to your other drive. Then you'd be able to go back to disk management and select "Delete Partition" and then proceed to repartition/reformat it. Then go back and move the recovered data back onto the drive.
Whew.
Let me know what happens.
Click to expand...
I do believe we're on to something here! I loaded that program up and searched. It found the F: drive (I'm just going to call it that now) but has it as (lost) under the Logical Drive heading. When I click Preview, it doesn't show any files in the Root Directory box. However, when I do a "Lost Data" search on it, it pulls up all kinds of things. Unfortunately, it pulls them up as clusters. As long as the whole thing is smaller than one cluster, the data's good (I have a couple of gif's and such) other than that, I've just got a bunch of discombobulated data. Is there anyway to put clusters back together as a cohesive file? I tried searching for "Lost Files" but it only pulls up the clusters.

...getting there....

David.
 
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