2nd Hard Disk gone!!! Please help!

[flyingox]

Hi,

I recently formatted my pc with windows SP3. I used to have 2 hard disk and only formatted the main hard disk, leaving the 2nd Western Digital SATA hard disk untouched.

However, when the formatting is completed, i realise that the 2nd hard disk has "disappearred" while everything else works find. I can see the 2nd hard disk in CMOS. When i launched the computer management, the 2nd hard disk shows - Disk 1 Dynamic with a yellow excalmation mark. When i right click it, and try to Import Foreign Disks, the following message appear:

An unexpected error has occurred. Check the system event log for more information on the error. Close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer.

Is it possible to reactivate my 2nd hard disk? Is it already damaged?

I'll need to get the 2nd hard disk up as soon as possible to retrieve important data stored there.

Please help!

Thanks in advance.

[Paul Komski]

Do you know if the one or both disks were dynamic before you formatted the main hard disk? If you are using XP Pro not Home had you striped or mirrored or spanned your hard drives?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

Depending on how the drive came to be classed as Dynamic may make data on it recoverable or not; if it was part of a striped set the likelihood is that all data is not recoverable. In other cases you may be able to scan the drive with GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org)(for FAT or NTFS) and as a first step see if you data is visible. Options on how to recover it can then be taken.