IDE harddrive in Device Manager but not in My Computer

[karlev]

Hello........

My system consists of the following:

Motherboard.......MSI (K8T Neo-V)
CPU..................AMD Sempron 3000+
Memory.............512MB DDR400
Bootdrive 'C'.......WD SATA 200GB
IDE1..................Maxtor 60GB(Master) taken from another PC with data.
IDE2.................Optorite CD-RW(Master) and Sony DVD Rom(Slave).
OS...................Windows XP Pro (SP2).

All the drives are recognised in the BIOS and Device Manager but the Maxtor IDE drive does not show in My Computer. I intend to use this drive as a backup.

Any help towards fixing this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Kindest regards,

Karlev

[Paul Komski]

This could be the upper and lower filters issue for which there a patches/scripts you could try if you dont want to try editing the regsitry yourself.

see http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1057386021

But first check Disk Management diskmgmt.msc from the run box and see if the drive is recognised in there.

[karlev]

Hello......

Thanks for your early response.
The IDE drive is recognized in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) along with the SATA drive 'C', but it does not have a letter it's blank.

Awaiting your early response.
Thank you.

Kindest regards,
Karlev

[classicsoftware]

Rt click on it and change the drive letter to whatever you want. You may have to format it first. All of the options will be available after right clicking.

[karlev]

Hello.......

Thanks for the quick reply.

After right clicking the only available options are, 'Delete Partition and Help'.

The other options; Open, Explore, Mark Partition as Active, Change drive letters and paths and Format are all greyed out.

I am trying to avoid formatting of the drive..... I need the data on it.

Hoping to hear from you.

Thank you,

Kindest regards,

Karlev

[jcnoernberg]

Try using Partition Magic 30-day trial to assign a letter to the drive.

[Paul Komski]

I think the grayed options are likely to relate to a corrupt/damaged partition boot sector but I'm not sure of the safest way to try repairing it when you have important data on it. Fixboot X: (X representing the currently non-existent drive letter) from the recovery console might work.

The easiest way forwards does depend a bit on whether the drive is still recognised OK in its original computer. If it is then use the original computer to copy the files to DVD or to a FAT partition and transfer the FAT partition to your current PC. You could also use recovery software such as GetDataBack for NTFS from www.runtime.org and copy the files one by one for free or pay and copy the data in batches.

Then format the no-letter partition.