lost secondary hard drive <<HELP!>>

  • Thread starter Thread starter nutz
  • Start date Start date
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nutz

A couple of days ago I went to my PC and found a BSoD on screen, I just
put it down to the heat and rebooted. Wouldnt boot, kept getting blue
screen errors (various) and eventually I unplugged my secondary hard
drive and booted successfully. Whenever I plug the drive back in I get
a BSoD, leaving it out Windows is okay.
So I put the secondary drive in as a slave on another machine, and hey
presto it boots. I caught a glimpse of the 'new device detected' blurb
before it recognised it as a hard drive and the popup disappeared. But
when I look in My Computer there is only the C drive listed! Device
Manager shows the two drives okay and says there is no problem with it,
but in Windows itself I cant 'see' it. Obvious solution is format it,
but I cant do that - I have no backup of a huge folder of images on
that drive (the secondary drive WAS my backup, and recently I formatted
my main drive so I dont have another copy of its contents).
Unfortunately there's no copy of Windows on that drive so I cant boot
from it as a master. In Admin Tools>Computer Management it shows the
second drive (no drive letter assigned) as "Online" and "Healthy". What
can I do? :o(
By the way, both computers (my main and the temp one I tried loading it
on) are running WinXP, one Home and one Pro. The hard drive is
formatted as NTFS
 
nutz said:
A couple of days ago I went to my PC and found a BSoD on screen, I just
put it down to the heat and rebooted. Wouldnt boot, kept getting blue
screen errors (various) and eventually I unplugged my secondary hard
drive and booted successfully. Whenever I plug the drive back in I get
a BSoD, leaving it out Windows is okay.
So I put the secondary drive in as a slave on another machine, and hey
presto it boots. I caught a glimpse of the 'new device detected' blurb
before it recognised it as a hard drive and the popup disappeared. But
when I look in My Computer there is only the C drive listed! Device
Manager shows the two drives okay and says there is no problem with it,
but in Windows itself I cant 'see' it. Obvious solution is format it,
but I cant do that - I have no backup of a huge folder of images on
that drive (the secondary drive WAS my backup, and recently I formatted
my main drive so I dont have another copy of its contents).
Unfortunately there's no copy of Windows on that drive so I cant boot
from it as a master. In Admin Tools>Computer Management it shows the
second drive (no drive letter assigned) as "Online" and "Healthy". What
can I do? :o(
By the way, both computers (my main and the temp one I tried loading it
on) are running WinXP, one Home and one Pro. The hard drive is
formatted as NTFS
Click to expand...

"In Admin Tools>Computer Management it shows the
second drive (no drive letter assigned) as "Online" and "Healthy". What
can I do? :o("

You nearly figured it out yourself...

All you need to do is assign the drive a letter.
 
Mr.Helpful said:
"In Admin Tools>Computer Management it shows the
second drive (no drive letter assigned) as "Online" and "Healthy". What
can I do? :o("

You nearly figured it out yourself...

All you need to do is assign the drive a letter.
Click to expand...

Sorry forgot to say you need to right-click on the drive in question and
select "Change Drive Letter and Paths", then click on Add.

Choose the letter you want to access it by, now you will be able to access
the drive.
 
Mr.Helpful said:
Sorry forgot to say you need to right-click on the drive in question and
select "Change Drive Letter and Paths", then click on Add.

Choose the letter you want to access it by, now you will be able to access
the drive.
Click to expand...

No go :o(
The only thing available in the popup from right clicking the drive is
Delete Partition - everything else is greyed out
 
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