Hard Drive Not Recognized by Windows

[babutiger]

I am running winXP and have two hdds - one (master) being the boot/game drive and other (secondary) being back-up/mp3 drive. My PC crashed the other day while in game (contents on master drive) and when windows rebooted my secondary hard drive was no longer displayed under my computer. I find it very strange since the secondary drive was not being used directly. I have important data on this drive and do not want to lose anything through a reformat. Any suggestions on how to have windows detect the hdd or salvage the data?

Cheers.

 

[Bozo Galora]

slave the drive to another known working HDD
or the recovery console (tappinf F8 key while booting)
or a repair install of XP (loose all settings and drivers, but no data)

Edit: Windows XP has a certain mode whereby if a drive has a problem, it will progressively lower the speed of the drive to "save" it. in abourt six steps. Like from UDMA 5 to 4 to 3 to PIO 4 to gone. You could delete all the HDD showing in dev manager in safe mode, and reboot and let XP redetect. You risk nothing here, since you can still do the above.

 

[babutiger]

Thanks Bozo Galora... I will give those ideas a go but I have some new info that has come to light.

I just noticed under Computer Management/Disk Managment the secondary hard drive is listed but the entire drive is shown as unallocated. In addition, the secondary hdd is detected under device manager and the device status states "This device is working properly".

Just to follow up on your last point, under the ATA controller properties the secondary hdd, a Seagate 120GB 7200 8MB ATA-100, is listed correctly as Ultra DMA 5 - Ultra100 with no conflicts under the "Resources" tab.

It seems that WinXp during the crash erased the drive's partiton. Should I reformat and then use a data recovery program? Would that be the best way to retrieve my datat? If so which program do you all recommend?

 

[Bozo Galora]

"reformat" is not the answer, your partition table is damaged/corrupt - so the above solutions will not pertain
the partitions are still there, just not listed

there are many apps that can recover your partition table or the data with no partitions enabled

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-partition-recovery.htm
http://www.sharewareconnection.com/titles/repair-partition.htm

I used to use (free) Ranish Part Manager, but that was a long time ago.
Dont know what the current vers does
http://www.ranish.com/part/

also these
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ (partition saving)

Hirens Boot CD 7.4 has a hundred repair utilities