My Harddisk is missing from Windows Explorer!

I have a HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop with Windows XP MCE installed on it. I've had it for nearly two years, and it's fared well, despite some aesthetic damage, over that time. Shortly before WinXP SP3 was released, I started noticing that my C drive was missing from the My Computer Folder. Worse still, any application that I'm running that needs to access the drive seems to not be able to find it in the normal Explorer dialog window, leaving me with typing the physical address for the folder/ file I'm looking for. Can anyone tell me what the deal is? I can still acess my C Drive, duh, but Explorer can't seem to see it.

 

Try running CHKDSK (Error Checking)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265/en-us
If you have trouble running it, I suggest checking in Safe Mode.

Matt

 

I tried that already.
It took an seemingly excruciating five hours in order to do so, as well…
But my C drive is still missing from Windows Explorer.
Now it seems that I can't get two folder levels deep before Windows Explorer suffers a fatal error and restarts itself.
I'm about two or three stages short of pounding my head on the desktop.
(My table's desktop, not my laptops.)

 

Just a stab in the dark.......Could it possibly have disappeared from BIOS? - That is if you are booting to a different drive (d: )

 

is there also an operand to have chkdsk look for an external HDD ?

 

Is it possible the drive is overfilled with files? I would not like to get less than 20% free space. I see strange things happen at around 10%.

Go to Control Panel -> Internet Options and on the first tab, delete the Temporary Internet Files. Run Disk Cleanup.

Do you happen to have Daemon Tools installed? Uninstall it. Uninstall any other programs you might not need any more (you can install them again if you find you need them later on).

The long time for running CHKDSK may well mean it was making a lot of repairs.

If you cannot see how much space is left on the drive, try running a Defragmentation. It will give you an error message if the free space is less than 15%.

Matt

 

Hmm, that might be the cause of it.
I do know that a few months back, I had some trouble installing a firewall and anti-virus update…
That could have been the cause of it.
(Although I'm booting off of the C drive, not the D drive, which is more of a re-purposed drive sector.)
Now, how would I go about checking that?

 

That could also be possible.
I run a 3D rendering app, and I have quite a few gigs of it's content, and just as many of that contents installation apps, on my HDD.
Last I checked, I have around 9.6 Gbs left on my 100Gb hard rive.
Guess I need to make a run at Office Depot and pick up some more dual layer discs…