Hello and thanks for looking at my post. I've looked through the forums and so far haven't found an answer that works for my problem. recently I added a new HDD into my friend's comp, moved some HDDs into different bays, etc. After I made sure that everything was connected again, I closed it and started Windows XP up. When I went to "my computer", the new drive and another drive I had moved didn't appear. When I open "device manager" and "disc management", the 2 drives are there. When I formatted the brand new drive in "disc management", it appeared in "my computer" as "New Volume (F" and was working. I thought that maybe if I changed the drive letter of the other one it would work, but it won't give that option. When I right click on the drive, the only options I have are "delete partition" and "help". Re-formating the drive isn't an option, since it contains a lot of stuff not easily replaced (I know, always back up your data on CD) and right now I'm stumped. I've tried changing jumper settings a bit and I plan on trying to change the screwed-up drives position on the IDE cables; but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Steps to take: 1. use scandisk as jony218 suggested 2. change the ide/sata cable 3. transplant the drive to another computer 4. use the freezing technique if all else fails -hope this helps
I want to say thanks to everyone for their suggestions; I really do appreciate it. The problem with trying to run scandisc is that the problem drive has no letter associated with it. I've tried changing the cable; no luck there. I don't have another comp around to put it into and don't really feel cofortable about the freesing trick since it's not my drive or my data at risk. I'm still working on this problem and promise to reply when I fix this problem and what I did.
First off scandisk nothing as it can make things worse attempting chkdsk repairs. It would be best to put everything back the way it was before moving anything,the disk with delete or help if i'm not mistaken in comp management would have appeared in yellow ??,that usually means corrupted drive,however it could also mean the setup is wrong,if for any reason things don't go back to normal you can install ubuntu to the newly formatted hdd & set the data drive as slave & recover any data you need assuming anythings recoverable,or use partition magic & undelete any recoverable partitions
Problem solved !!!! (probably) I tried using Knoppix Ver 3.4 and I could read the data on the messed up drive, but not write to any hard drive (Knoppox automatically sets mounted drives to "read only"). I tried changing the drive's properties to "enable read/write", but Unix has a hard time working with Windows NTFS. There is a way my version of Knoppix to deal with NTFS, but for some reason it wasn't working for me. I didn't want to spend even more time trying to find out why, so I downloaded 'Partition Find and Mount' and ran it. After a little read of the instructions and running a scan on the drive through it, I had the drive showing up in 'My Computer'. Since PF&M doesn't mount a drive so you can write to it, I will be moving all the data to somewhere more stable. It's about 75GB worth of stuff, so it'll take some time but the dozen or so picture, music, and movie files seem O.K. Once again, thanks to you all for your help and suggestions!
