Cannot see second drive after system crash

A friend of mine's computer crashed and he reinstalled xp on the primary 120gig drive. His second drive is used for data, photos etc. The problem now is after reinstalling xp the second drive is no longer visible from Windows. I am puzzled because he says he followed the instructions and only formatted the first drive and did nothing with the second drive. Any suggestions as to why the second drive does not show up anymore?

 

Is there potential for any problems with using both a SATA and an IDE drive in this setup? I see that this might cause some problems and would be useful info.

Also, if you haven't already, check the BIOS to be sure that both drives are being seen there. If a SATA drive is involved, it will likely only show up in the Boot order.

 

Both drives are IDE. There is no SATA drive in his system.

 

Another possibility, once again requiring a check of the BIOS. It may be possible that you have a CD-ROM drive connected to the same cable as one of the hard drives or both HDs are on the same cable (making both devices either Primary or Secondary) and the jumpers on the drives are both set to Master or both set to Slave. If this is the case, move one of the jumpers so that you do not have this conflict.

Hope this helps.

 

He told me that he did not touch any hardware for the reinstall. I suspect that somehow he managed to corrupt the second drive and that is why it is no longer seen by windows. Given that how could I recover data if something has become corrupt? Is there a program or something that is useful in a situation like this?

 

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntrecover.shtml

 

Hello wheres all the posts gone?

I thought I had a legitimate question!

I have now looked futher and now know the answer anyway.

Talk about censorship!

Thanks

tel33

 

when the machine boots, do you see it detecting both drives in the BIOS screen?

If you 'Manage' (right click my computer) and look at the disk management screen, what do you see for that other drive?


Did you put the service pack 1 or 2 back on the machine yet? You may be running into a Logical Block Addressing problem, especially if this machine was a win98 upgrade.

 

Yes the BIOS sees both drives at boot up. It was a clean install of XP and is up to date with service pack 2.
I suspect when my friend had the system crash it corrupted the second drive somehow. His data may be unrecoverable with my skill level.

 

If you 'Manage' (right click my computer) and look at the disk management screen, what do you see for that other drive?

 

Will check that today and post back with results.

 

Success!!
I used a small program called "testdisk" and it allowed me to recover the entire harddrive. With this program I was able to rewrite the partition table and it worked.

 

Hi there

Thats good news, can you post the site where we can find the Testdisk program?

Regards

Tel33

 

Thanks for the link

Regards

tel33