Lost D: slave drive. How to reinstall?

[Rubix]

I have two 180+ GB hard drives on my PC. I reformatted and unpartitioned
them and reinstalled windows XP home edition due to system problems.

Now one of them (the slave drive) has disappeared from view completely when
I go to My Computer and my DVD drive has been relabeled as my new D: drive.
The missing drive shows up on only on the system boot page and the BIOS/CMOS
setup pages.

How can I make my slave drive visible and usable again?

Rubix

 

[Thane of Lochaber]

Run diskmgmt.msc and you should see your second drive listed there. Right
click it and select "Change Drive Letters and Paths". Click Change in the
dialog that pops up and you should be able to select a free drive letter.
You might want to change your CD-ROM from D: to E: so you can free up D: for
your hard drive.

Hope that works

 

[Rubix]

Thanks, I've tried it and found my missing drive

I had to partition and format the unallocated disk and I am not sure what
sort of partition was required for a slave drive.( I chose primary, not
extended).
Rubix

 

[Nathan McNulty]

That was correct. When you said this: "I reformatted and unpartitioned
them" I began to wonder. You must create a partition before you can
format the drive. You must first make a primary partition before you
can make an extended partition. Here is a great source for information
on this:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/structPartitions-c.html

 

[Thane of Lochaber]

Actually is is possible to create only an extended partition on your second
drive, the only drawback I know of being you can't boot from it. I don't
really know any advantage though and I always make a primary partition
myself.