2nd Hard Drive Not Recognised By XP

I had need to reinstall XP. So before the new install I copied all my data to a folder on my "D" drive. The problem is that now I cannot access the "D" drive, it is recognised by the BIOS and also in XP Disc Management it is identified as a Primary Disc and is marked Active.
I have tried to allocate a drive letter in disc managent, this option is "greyed out ". I have tried to use Diskpart to assign a drive letter but this utility says there is no volume. I have also tried to retrieve the data by logging on as Administrator but although I can access the drive as F: I am not allowed to access the archive folder, "access denied ", Administrator only allowed to access root files and /Windows.
Please can anyone help?

 

Many thanks for the reply but the problem is that I can only access the "D" drive when logged on as administrator in a command line mode (doing a boot up Repair sessio) which denies access to user files. When logged on to XP with an Admin Group user the ex "D" drive has not been allocated a drive letter so taking ownership is not an option.
Regards
Gavin

 

Gavin, you would have to take ownership of the files you want to access while being logged in as Administrator.

Once you are the owner of the files, you can do whatever you like with them.

 

Are you able to reassign drive C:\ as the primary drive in BIOS? It seems odd to me your drive D:\ is being recognized as the primary drive if it is intended to only contain data and not the OS.

 

Since you say you can access the drive as an "F" drive, perhaps you can evoke a command session and use the CACLS command to modify the discretionary permissions of that folder. For example:

CACLS "C:\System Volume Information" /e /g username:f allows me to gain access to the System Volume Information folder. The /e switch allows for editing rather than replacing the DACL while the /g switch allows for granting the permission that follows it, in the example that would be granting full f) permission to <username>. Substitute your own user name on the computer for "username" in the example. Surround any path statement that contains embedded spaces with quotation marks as shown.

You can get a full explanation of the command by running CACLS /?

 

I think I had better clarifythe situation.
Both HDs are identical 120Gb IDE disks:-
Disc0 is "C" IDE 0 Master, working fine with new install of XP, Disk Management sees this disk as Volume (C Primary partition Type Basic NTFS Status Healthy (System)
Disk 1 is "old D:" IDE 1 Master, named Data and Archive, Disk Management sees this disk as Volume (Data and Archive (no drive letter)) Primary partition Type Basic NTFS Status Healthy (Active). This volume is visible to the BIOS but not in "My Computer ". This volume is visible when I boot up using the XP install disc and take the repair (R) option and log on as Administrator, as F:, but I get "Access denied" when I try to access user folders.
This is my problem, please help.
Regards
Gavin

 

I had somewhat of a similar problem Gavin, access denied to any of the data in My Documents after I changed the old drive C:\ to a slave drive D:\, installed a brand new drive C:\ and re-loaded the OS into the new drive.

I was able to solve the problem by temporarily reversing the drives, i.e., returned the old drive to its C:\ designation, made the new disk drive D:\, and reformatting it to remove the newly installed OS.

Then I ran the Copy Disk utility included in the Lifeguard Tools CD that came with the new Western Digital hard drive. It copied the entire disk, including the OS from the C:\ drive to the new drive D:\. The old drive was in its last legs so I was really lucky to complete the copy operation.

After connecting the new disk as drive C:\ the computer has been running normally for about 7 weeks, with two minor exceptions: The icons for the Microsoft Office programs now show-up as generic icons (plain white rectangles with a blue bar along the top); and System Restore now returns the message "System restore is unable to protect your computer" and I have not found an effective fix for that. I read somewhere (Microsoft's Knowledge Base I think) the condition is typical after using the Data Lifeguard Copy Disk utility. I hope this helps.

 

Gavin, was your old hard disk formatted or setup by a 3rd party utility?

 

No it was set up by XP when I added it about 6 months ago as a second HD then formated using Disk Managerment in Admin Tools.
Regards
Gavin

 

Can't think why I didn't think of that, I will try this evening (it's a good job I'm retired - I'm sure I didn't spend this amount of time on a problem at a clients site). I just hope that I can find a similar utility for my Maxtor disks.
Regards
Gavin

 

Strange. Very strange. Never had this problem. Seems like some partition info got scrambled or there is some defect on the disk.

Check with manufacturer's util.