Lost access to a 180GB hard drive

[Guest]

I am running xp with sp2. hard drive shows up in disk manager as
health/active online, but does not have a drive letter assigned to it. Right
click does not give me the option to asign a drive letter. This hard drive
was working fine yesterday with about 85GB of files stored on it. CPU 2.4GHz.
Hard drives does not show up in window explorer. What is up with this?

 

[Guest]

Have you tried Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management >
Disk Management ?

 

[Guest]

Partition Magic 8.0 from Symantec give you the possibility to
asign a letter for all you HD I am not sure but mybe SySandrasoft geves
the same possibility.
QuitMonty21

 

[Guest]

Yes, That is the confusion. it does show up in disk management but It does
not have a drive letter asigned to it. I had over 80 GB of files on this
hard drive and now I can not assign a drive letter to it. I installed this
hard drive about a year ago and FAT formated it and have been using it since
then. I ran the Western digital diag software on this hard disk but I still
can not see the drive or copy/paste from this drive. I looked in the Bios
and it shows up there as a secondard slave drive, which is what I Originally
set it up for. All the jumpers (Slave/Master) are set correctly also.

Thanks Cliff

 

[Ghostrider]

Yes, That is the confusion. it does show up in disk management but It does
not have a drive letter asigned to it. I had over 80 GB of files on this
hard drive and now I can not assign a drive letter to it. I installed this
hard drive about a year ago and FAT formated it and have been using it since
then. I ran the Western digital diag software on this hard disk but I still
can not see the drive or copy/paste from this drive. I looked in the Bios
and it shows up there as a secondard slave drive, which is what I Originally
set it up for. All the jumpers (Slave/Master) are set correctly also.

Thanks Cliff

So what happened yesterday to change the computer? From this point on,
attempts to re-assign a drive letter may be fraught with problems. Is
there a backup to the important files in this partition? If not, then
the first order of business is to attempt to retrieve these files. One
method is to remove the drive and put it into an external enclosure and
copy the files to different media or location. Once this has been done,
then return the drive to the computer and use Disk Management or even
a third-party utility to try to restore the drive letter. While a drive
letter may be re-assigned, the odds are that the partition will then
show up as unformatted or RAW.

 

[Anna]

Yes, That is the confusion. it does show up in disk management but It
does
not have a drive letter asigned to it. I had over 80 GB of files on this
hard drive and now I can not assign a drive letter to it. I installed
this
hard drive about a year ago and FAT formated it and have been using it
since
then. I ran the Western digital diag software on this hard disk but I
still
can not see the drive or copy/paste from this drive. I looked in the Bios
and it shows up there as a secondard slave drive, which is what I
Originally
set it up for. All the jumpers (Slave/Master) are set correctly also.

Thanks Cliff

Gary:
We'll assume that the WD HDD diagnostic utility you ran indicated the disk
is non-defective.

Presumably you've checked the drive for any malware and it's clean, right?

So do this...

Shut down the machine, disconnect that secondary HDD, and boot with only
your boot drive connected.
We'll assume the system boots without incident and functions without any
problems.
Shut down the machine and reconnect that secondary HDD. Ensure that it's
correctly connected/jumpered. I know you said it was, but re:check.
Power on and see if the problem is corrected.
If still no go, try connecting the disk to another IDE channel and see if
that works.
Anna

 

[Guest]

Hi Ghostrider, tried all the above. I have three hard drive running, one is
the c drive which is my primary drive and two secondard drives H and G. The G
drive is the one that I lost the drive letter two (WD180GB). I first tried
reconnecting only my C drive and the WD180GB to the same IDE controller
socket. and then moved back to the second IDE controller socket. I even
changed the order on the cables. No luck The other hard drive is still
working fine also.

Since I have winxp sp2 running for some time now I know that I am not
bumping up on the 132GB limits that the old windows had. I have not added
too or change any software or hardware to this computer. I know any time the
computer has troubles is to first look at what changes have been made. no
changes were made before this problem cropped up.

I have a bad feeling that the hard drive itself may have some kind of
hardware failure. I will try to install some type of software that has the
ability to assign the drive letter.

I have a good knowledge of computers and have good working knowledge of how
to use the disk management tools. This is a strange one because the diag
software shows this as a good active hard drive. I also tried to rescan and
refresh this drive but nothing has given me access to this hard drive.

I not sure what you mean by removing the hard drive and (put it into an
external enclosure)? I was thinking on installing this hard drive in another
computer as a last dig effort but I really do not this will resolve my
problem with this hard drive.

Thanks for the feed back

 

[Guest]

Thanks Anna, already tried this and many other configuations.

 

[Guest]

I will give this a try.

Thanks QuitMonty21

 

[Anna]

Thanks Anna, already tried this and many other configuations.

Gary:
In your recent post addressed to Ghostrider, you state "I have a bad feeling
that the hard drive itself may have some kind of hardware failure. I will
try to install some type of software that has the ability to assign the
drive letter."

First of all, if the HDD does have a "hardware" problem, it's hard to
imagine that "some type of software" will resolve the problem re assigning a
drive letter and at the same time ensure that the drive will function
without subsequent problems.

And just to confirm...you did say that you ran the WD diagnostic utility
(the "long" or "full" test I hope) and no errors were reported with the
disk, right?

I just want you (and others who may be interested in this subject) to know
that when we come across this problem (and it's a quite common problem)
involving a non-recognized secondary PATA HDD, and it's *clear* that the
disk is *non-defective*, in the overwhelming number of cases the problem is
due to a misconnected or misconfigured HDD, i.e., the drive is incorrectly
jumpered. Occasionally it's a defective IDE cable (or its cable connector)
and possibly a defective motherboard IDE connector, the latter being a very
rare event.
Anna

 

[David B.]

Did you actually read the OP? You even quoted it in your reply "hard drive
shows up in disk manager as health/active online, but does not have a drive
letter assigned to it. Right click does not give me the option to asign a
drive letter"

 

[Guest]

Hi Anna, I went through all of the configuations that you mentioned before I
posted this on this discussion group. Remember this hard drive was working
fine for about a year. I first rearranged the hard drive on the same cable
that my primary hard drive was on. I disconnected all other hard drives.
That did not help. The jumper settings for the 180GB was set for slave. I
changed out the cables also just in case that might be the problem. Nothing
I have done so far has fixed the failure. If the
motherboard IDE connector was defective it would have showed up after I
used my other hard drive on the primary IDE connector. After I tried the
180GB on the same connector I remove it and installed my other hard drive and
It worked fine on that IDE connector. So what is left but a defective 180GB
drive. Well, since I have not been up on the latest trouble shooting on
newer computers I thought it best to post this problem just to take advantage
of the great expertise from the people that have the most experience. I do
appreciate all the advise that has come out of this so thank you very much
for taking the time to share your knowledge.

Gary

 

[Ghostrider]

laser wrote:

I not sure what you mean by removing the hard drive and (put it into an
external enclosure)? I was thinking on installing this hard drive in another
computer as a last dig effort but I really do not this will resolve my
problem with this hard drive.

Thanks for the feed back

With the proliferation of external USB/Firewire drive enclosures and
docks, we have adopted the technique of mounting faulty hard drives
from computers and putting them into these instead of attaching them
as slave drives or even to the secondary IDE controller. Drives put
into these enclosures are typically seen as removable drives. We have
always felt intuitively that it was safer to manipulate them in this
state instead of them being a mounted drive to a motherboard controller
and have, in fact, been relatively successful at it.

 

[Guest]

final post and fix for my lost hard drive
I purchased Stellar Phoenix windows data recovery software and was able to
copy all files to another hard drive. This software picked up all types of
Pict. formats and Doc files and many other types of file types that I never
new about.

Thanks for all the help from every one.

Gary