Can't Access Second Hard Drive

[nusnammj]

Hi,

I run a system with a 38gb hard drive for my OS (XP) and a 250gb for all my pics, music, docs etc. I had some niggly probs with windows and so I booted up with the windows disk, formatted my OS drive and reinstalled windows clean.

All went fine until i tried to access my second hard drive, it has not been assigned a drive letter. It appears in the Disk Manager and appears in Device manager but now drive letter. The change letter / path option in Disk Manager isn't available all it will let me do is delete the partition which i don't want to do as there is 80gb of stuff on it that i want. Disk Manager claims the drive is healthy and all that also.

I thought at first that it might be as i installed windows with it connected so I went into BIOS and disabled it, turned off, unplugged inside the rebooted and formatted and reinstalled windows again. Once up and running i turned off, plugged back in, changed BIOS back to active for that drive and booted up. XP started fine and found new hardware and said it was ready to use, again it appeared in disk manager and device manager but still no drive letter and I am getting fed up now!!! lol

I have checked cable connections etc which are all ok the jacks are on cable select as that is the cable i have and it was working before i formatted the way it is anyway???

Anyone got some peals of wisdom cos me really getting fed up!!!!!

Cheers in advance

Matty

 

[nusnammj]

Well now it works under very strange circumstances!!!

Just so people now in case they get stuck like me here is what I did.

I turned on the pc and it loaded as normal then I checked My Computer and still one hard drive. Sort of give up and decided to start loading all me programmes onto my OS hard drive so I installed Norton Firewall 2006, this finished and told me to restart which I did.

Once the system rebooted I checked My Computer and still only one hard drive so I installed Norton Systemworks 2006. Again this told me to restart my pc which I did.

Upon restarting as the system booted up the windows scandisk facility thing that comes up before windows appeared. It said Drive D (my other hard drive!!!) was inconsistent and needed scanning which it scanned, found no problems and finished loading windows. I then checked My Computer and there it was [] hurray!!!! []

It is now there like it always was and I haven't got the faintest idea why!!!!!! But i don't care anymore!! lol

Obviously got something to do with Norton being installed but what or why I have no idea!!!