hard disk problem

[samkatta]

hi there everybody. I'm new to this forum. I've a problem with my hard disk that i hope someone can help me out with. my story goes as follows: i have an athlon xp 1900+ system with two hard disks one running windows xp proffesional (not partitioned) and the other one for storage (partitioned into three volumes), for a system error i had regretfuly to format the winxp drive and reinstalled windows, but my shock was that windows xp didn't list the other hard disk under my computer. the hard disk is detected correctly in the bios. another thing windows xp shows the drive as healthy and active system drive in disk management but it's not assigning it any letters and showing it as a whole volume with no partitions and the only highlighted option for this drive in disk management is to delete the partition. Where did my partitions go? I have valuable saves on these partitions that i want to retrieve but i don't know how! can any one help me please?

[welshboy]

If possible, find out the make and model of your HD and have a look at their website. With luck you may be able to download diagnostic tools to identify what the problem is and if it can be fixed.

Otherwise try running Partition Magic by Powerquest (see link below) to identify what the status of the drive is. I had a similar problem when I installed a new HD on my machine - I thought I had created 3 partitions but fdisk (old dos utility) messed up when creating the 2nd and 3rd partitions. I was able to use Partition Magic to identify what the problems were. I then effectively "scrubbed" the drive clean of all partitions using a tool from IBM before I created 3 fresh working ones with Partition Magic. I'm not saying you will have to do this, I hope you dont as, overall, the process took the best part of 5 hours on my 40gig drive!!! What you may be able to do, however, is use Partition Magic to sort out the problems you are experiencing.

Hope this helps
Richard

http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/