New Slave Drive No Longer Known Partition

[Guest]

I installed a new internal slave drive on Saturday, using XP's disk
management wizard. Assigned a new drive letter, verified it stuck by powering
cycling my PC, then used it to move big files off of my primary drive to make
room. All was fine on Saturday, even after turning the PC on/off. Sunday I
powered up the PC, but no slave drive icon was there. Opened disk management
, drive 1 there, so were its partitions, but no longer assigned drive letters
and now are "unknown partitions." Disk management will not allow anything but
"delete partition" to select; all other functions are grayed out (assign
drive letter, format, reassign, etc.).

Does anyone know how to reassign drive letters in this case so the slave
drive (new) is regognizable so I can retrieve my files, etc?

Much appreciated.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Opened disk management
, drive 1 there, so were its partitions, but no longer assigned drive letters
and now are "unknown partitions." Disk management will not allow anything but
"delete partition" to select; all other functions are grayed out (assign
drive letter, format, reassign, etc.).

This suggests to me that they have got marked as Hidden - How I don't
know. What I would do is get BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com
($35 shareware - 30 day full functional trial)

Download, to its own folder, extract from the zip, run the bootitng to
make a boot floppy.

Boot the floppy, Cancel Install, entering maintenance, then click on
Partition work.
Select HD1 - the troubled one, on the left, then highlight partitions in
the middle, click Properties. If there is an Unhide button, use it

 

[Guest]

This suggests to me that they have got marked as Hidden - How I don't
know. What I would do is get BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com
($35 shareware - 30 day full functional trial)

Download, to its own folder, extract from the zip, run the bootitng to
make a boot floppy.

Boot the floppy, Cancel Install, entering maintenance, then click on
Partition work.
Select HD1 - the troubled one, on the left, then highlight partitions in
the middle, click Properties. If there is an Unhide button, use it

Thank you Alex. Unhiding Drive1 partitions with BootIT NG got me a step
closer. Disk Management now sees the slave partitions, and the slave drive
icons are back. However, the partitions are recognized as not formatted, and
no files are seen on them, even if I use a 3rd party data recovery tool like
Search & Recover 2. I've not messed with the formatting since I originally
copied my files onto the slave drive, especially after realizing that the
disk was not visible. Any suggestions on how I can recover my slave drive
files, which now appear to be on "unformatted" but "known/healthy"
partitions? One step closer... ...Keith

 

[Alex Nichol]

Thank you Alex. Unhiding Drive1 partitions with BootIT NG got me a step
closer. Disk Management now sees the slave partitions, and the slave drive
icons are back. However, the partitions are recognized as not formatted, and
no files are seen on them, even if I use a 3rd party data recovery tool like
Search & Recover 2. I've not messed with the formatting since I originally
copied my files onto the slave drive, especially after realizing that the
disk was not visible. Any suggestions on how I can recover my slave drive
files, which now appear to be on "unformatted" but "known/healthy"
partitions? One step closer...

Next stage would be to "Take Ownership" - see that topic in Help and
Support