Hard drive not recognized

T

temperary

New Member
Hello
I just formatted my primary hard drive but before doing so I copied all of my important data to my 40GB backup drive. I turned off my computer and unpluged both the ide and power cables of the secondary (backup) drive just to be safe and I turned my computer back on with the windows disk in the drive bay so I could start formating. Everything went well, I installed windows and all of my programs and applications.

Then, I turned my computer off again, unpluged the psu and reconnected my slave (backup) hard drive. After I turned my computer back on though, Windows doesn't show the second hard drive in My Computer. However, it does show in the device manager under disk drives. Regardless, I cannot access the files on the drive as windows does not display the drive in my computer.

Do any of you know what's up?

Thanks in advance.
 
Go into Drive Management and see what's up. You may have to assign it a drive letter.

Go to Start > Run and type in compmgmt.msc. Find Drive Management in there and look for your drive.
 
Awesome... I didn't know about compmgmt.msc That's good to know

One thing though... I've found the drive, how do I assign it a drive letter?
 
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Haha, alright... thanks for all of your help anyway. At least you got me on the right track.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?
 
if you right click on where it says disk 1 can you select the option to initialize it?

Is there data on here you can't lose?
 
unfortunately yes... all of my data is on that drive... it is my backup drive, so all of my music, documents, pictures, etc. were transfered to that drive so that I could format the master drive.
 
This is really bothering me... I'm thinking I should have probably left it connected when formatting my master, that way when windows began its installation and started "searching hardware configuration" it would have recognized the back up drive and everything would have been fine.

Surely there's another way around this though...
 
It had windows on it ages ago... at least a year ago... I've formated at least 3 times since then too (the exact way I did it this time) and there has never been a problem.
 
change both of your drives to cable select jumper setting then boot up, what happens?

assuming they are IDE
 
Cable select won't work unless he has the special ribbon cable with the notch out of it.

Why the hell do people keep recommending that on here? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Not only that, assuming he did have the ribbon cable it's still not going to solve anything. The BIOS and Windows still see the drive, so it's not an issue of improper settings.

When I can get some motivation I'm going to search Google and see why that option is greyed out. There has to be a logical explanation.
 
well for one, certain systems (like HP/Compaqs, and some Dells) really only work with IDE devices as cable select.

You can set it up as master/slave but it won't recognize either drive. Its something on the firmware level that the manufacturer does. It doesn't hurt to try.
 
That's probably because they come with the cable select ribbons. They don't do anything to the drives (obviously :P). In fact, Dell tells you to use their ribbons for instance, as they don't guarantee that anyone else's ribbons will work.

http://pompone.cs.ucsb.edu/admin/530_Workstation/2drives.htm#1143575

NOTICE: Dell recommends that you use only EIDE cables purchased from Dell. Cables purchased elsewhere are not guaranteed to work with Dell computers.
Click to expand...

lol :D Now I'll just sit back and wait for someone to come in and tell me that they are propietary cables. hehe. See, it has nothing to do with the firmware.. It does have something to do with the ribbonware however.

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ide-cable-select.html

There's a little blurb on the cable select gizmo (Google is a wonderful thing :P)
 
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Dell, sounds like you are right about that, but I have personally battled with a few compaqs in my time and even if replacing cables with out the notch, and I seriously think its something they did in the BIOS.

That and the fact that their BIOS isn't very configurable in the first place. That was though, with the older machines.

The business class machines don't have that problem it was only the consumer end ones where I saw it.
 
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