Nobody Can Figure Out HD Problem ?!?!

S

schultzomerta

New Member
The motherboard went out in my old emachines desktop, which was running XP Home sp3, so I pulled the hard drive out to hopefully recover the data someday and trashed the rest of the computer. I have a new desktop running XP Pro sp3 and installed the old hard in the new desktop. I tried as a Master and Slave and neither worked! The old hard drive shows up in Bios, it shows as new hardware recognized and added when windows booted after install, it shows in the device manager as working properly and even shows in disk management screen, but without a drive letter and says unallocated. So why is my old HD not showing up in the My Computer screen and why can't I assign a drive letter to it? I just want to be able and access all my old files to burn onto DVDs so I can access the files or better yet just be able to use my old HD and access my old files whenever I want! I have searched all over and tried many things, but still no luck! PLEASE HELP!
 
In the process of removing and reattaching the sata/IDE cable might you have accidentally damaged the connection so the hard drive is recognized but the part of the connection that is responsible for the reading and writing could be damaged?

Thats just a guess but a little while ago I jammed an IDE cable onto a drive the wrong way a bit too hard and it pushed one of the gold pins in, so when I attached the cable the right way the drive was recognized but couldnt be accessed.
 
but without a drive letter and says unallocated. So why is my old HD not showing up in the My Computer screen and why can't I assign a drive letter to it?
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Unallocated means windows thinks the drive is unpartitioned. There is lots of different recovery software packages that you can try to look for files on it. I can't speak for any as I haven't used any, I'm sure a few people here have and someone will probably recommend something. I have heard that Acronis has a decent one.
 
Cromewell said:
Unallocated means windows thinks the drive is unpartitioned. There is lots of different recovery software packages that you can try to look for files on it. I can't speak for any as I haven't used any, I'm sure a few people here have and someone will probably recommend something. I have heard that Acronis has a decent one.
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The few programs I have downloaded all need the path of my HD, which is the part of my problem. I don't know the drive letter because it does not show up anywhere and I am unable to assign one without partitioning or formatting in which case I lose all my data!
 
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