Change Drive Command Question

[winxpuser50]

I had a drive crash and I'm trying to possibly fix the drive using chkdsk. I pulled the 60GB drive from my laptop, hooked it up to a drive enclosure with a usb connection and hooked that up to my new WinXP netbook.
It recognizes the drive as D and says "ready for use". The drive is spinning and not dead so it's not "fried".

I next went to "run", typed in "cmd" and that put me into the DOS window of WinXP. I wanted to change it from the C: drive to D: drive and I haven't used DOS in awhile so the command to do that from what I've found so far is D:and then hit "enter". But when I type D: and hit enter, it doesn't change the drive.
Either that's not the proper command for DOS in WinXP to change the drive or the computer isn't actually recognizing the drive even though the D drive is shown in My Computer.

btw, in order for the D drive to show up in My Computer, I had to click on an icon at the bottom of the screen toolbar that opened a box with various properties options, etc. so I chose "enable this device" which finally got the D drive to show up as an external device in My Computer. In other words, it didn't automatically put the D drive there, I had to do this option to make that happen.

When I clicked the D drive in My Computer, I got an error message, something like "inpage reading error"....indicates probably bad sectors or damaged files.
I have some precious data on the drive that i'm trying to transfer if I can see what's on the drive. Does anybody know why it won't change to the D drive in DOS screen of WIN XP. I was hoping to run chkdsk and /r (repair) to fix some bad sectors which is probably what is wrong with this drive, although it could be more serious but I want to try this at least. I'm mystified as to why I can't change the drive name in DOS. Thanks for your help!

 

[johnb35]

The only thing you can try doing is downloading the hard drive makers disk diagnostic utility and run it on the drive and see what happens. Most likely its shot.

 

[winxpuser50]

The only thing you can try doing is downloading the hard drive makers disk diagnostic utility and run it on the drive and see what happens. Most likely its shot.

How do I run a diagnostic on a drive that i can't open and won't boot? What I'm trying to do is read the drive so that I can transfer the files to a new drive. I don't think the drive is "shot", I think there's a corrupted MBR sector/file that's preventing it from booting into WinXP. I've tried Knoppix but that wouldn't load either, just kept getting blue screen. So I pulled the drive and put it in a SATA enclosure to try to transfer the contents of the drive or read the drive.

My main question was about the DOS command in changing the drive from C: to D: and why it won't show in DOS as having gone to the D: drive. Is that the correct syntax for changing drives? D: and then press "enter" ...thanks. btw, the drive is spinning, and powers up from the usb Sata drive, so it's not dead. I'm trying to do data recovery and also diagnose or fix the disc in DOS...