E: drive has disappeared

thealmightyone

thealmightyone

New Member
I have 2 hard drives, the raptor as the primary, as you can see below. Not long ago, the Seagate stopped appearing in My Computer, and I can't choose it in WIndows Media Player. It shows up fine on boot-up, and in the Device Manager list. Any thoughts/suggestions as to how to get it back?
 
In the Device Manager list, does it have a triangle and exclamation point next to it? (if you look at the properties, does it say that the device is working properly?)
 
If you are currently running XP you could right click on the drive listing in the device manager whether it did or didn't have a yellow mark as DCIScouts has already pointed out. On the right click menu the option to update drive will open a new screen where you would choose the automatic option to have XP search for any updates. It sounds like the driver got knocked out. The update link at Microsoft can also help at times by choosing the custom not express option to select hardware or software updates along with any priority types available when there.
 
I just corrected a big headache on one system whether neither the XP installer or Western Digital's own drive utilities failed to even detect a drive while it still was seen at post time. Someone had ruined the original installation with some boot leg crap versions on two partitions. The initial reformat with the updated fdisk for 98SE did see 98 start to go on. Finally XP recognised the drive and went on. It does sound like the partition information was somehow damaged or lost. If you could set the Seagate as the primary and disconnect the WD Raptor drive the fixboot and fixmbr commands might save the partition until you could backup any important files from it. This is where cd and dvd writers come in handy for backups before a drive gets tossed.
 
Windows 'Help and Support' showed me the way. Strange, I thought I had already formatted it. I guess this is another case closed.
 
If all you need is to do is create and format a new partition you can easily go into the Disk Management under Administrative Tools\Computer Management to see that done there. MS finally smartened up a little and incorporated some good tools in XP.
 
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