PC not recognising Slave Drive after Reinstall

[Fred C]

Before re-installing 'xp' i backed up a lot of data on a Slave Drive (D) ,
(C) is my System HDD,

Right, i took out the 'ide' cable and power to the Slave, and reformatted
and reinstalled XP on C: .. After i installed 'xp' i then connected the
Slave Drive, as i have done many times before, except..
1. It was not in Windows Explorer, C: was there, of course, and E: was
there, (my DVD drive)
2. In Computer Management Console, the Slave drive was there, but it was
labelled as 'Unallocated Space'
3. During boot up, my PC recognises that there are 2 HD's as it asks me to
press F1 to save the changes
4. The Slave drive is 10 gig, and on 1 boot up, it was labelled as 254,000mb
on the 'press F1 to save changes' screen ?

I darent do anything like, 'initialise' the HD in the Computer management
console, just in case i wipe whatever data might be left on the hard drive,
Can someone please tell me why this Reinstallation has gone a bit Pear
shaped, as ive done nothing different to the 5 or 6 other times ive
reinstalled and saved stuff to the Slave prior to Reinstalling 'xp'

Thanks a lot - Fred C

Compaq Deskpro 650mhz, running 'xp pro' no sp2 , Maxtor 80 gig hdd, and
slave is maxtor 10gig

The Slave hard drive is in device manager when i go to control
options/system/device manager ??

 

[Fred C]

Sorry 'bout that, double posted....
Fred C

 

[Guest]

Firstly I'd try another IDE cable, the wrong size-detection on one bootup is
suspicious in this respect.

What you do after that depends a lot on the filessytem on the disk. If it's
FAT32 I'd see if I could access it froma DOS bootdisk. In many ways this is a
safer way of testing than to keep trying to access it in Windows with a fault
present. It would also be worth looking at it with various
partition-management and diagnostic tools to see what kind of
partition-structure they think is present. Ranish partition manager will show
you the partition-structure.

If it wasn't the same disk and machine I'd think in terms of BIOS geometry
or possibly disk-signature problems. These seem unlikely if it's simply been
reconnected as before, though.

You could also see if a Knoppix or Ubuntu Live CD can access it. This method
should work for NTFS too. Since these Linuxes mount the disk readonly to
start with they won't compound the damage, which Windows might do if it
writes to the disk.

Hope this helps, this kind of hardware problem is not so easy to diagnose by
proxy; it's much easier if you have the computer in front of you!

 

[Fred C]

Thanks Ian, It WAS the IDE cable after all