Drive not found!?!

I created 2 partitions when I first setup my hard drives on Fat32. Everything was working fine untill I began downloading files onto my D: drive, and then there was an error message saying file can not be completed onto D: drive, then eventually my comp froze, so i manualy restarted, and now the whole D: drive is missing or not found... I'm stumped please help me

 

You say "my hard drives" so are we dealing with physical drives C & D? Or a single drive partitioned into C & D? Or something else?

Regular IDE drives or some sort of SCSI setup?

And usually on here it is a great idea to specify XP-Pro or XP-Home since they do so many things differently.

 

Yes they are regular IDE drives.. and I'm using Windows XP corporate final version. And yes it is only one drive partitioned into C: and D:; Hopefully someone can help me... if not I'll just reformat the whole drive

 

The reason for my question about IDE drive vs. drives was to get some testing/repair ideas.

And FWIW, you have 1 IDE hard drive with 2 partitions if I understand you correctly.

First possibility - your system has gotten confused about the physical size of your drive and the part it has forgotten about has the beginning of D on it.

Boot up and freeze on the screen that gives detailed system information (press the pause/break key when the screen appears) if you get that screen. Otherwise go into the BIOS settings. Make sure the drive is the size you expect.

If so, finish booting up and then open a DOS window and put in the following:

c: (and press ENTER)
chkdsk /f (and press ENTER then answer Yes when it asks about doing the job at next reboot)
d: (and press ENTER - I'm hoping DOS is stupid enough to see the missing drive. If so, continue. Otherwise, reboot now)
chkdsk /f

 

I can't fix the disk using that method if I can't access it... the whole drive is missing.. I tried using a western digital hard drive installer disk, and there was an error with drive 2.. and said it may be a hardware error.. so maybe its just something wrong with my hard drive altogether. During reboot, system shows only half of the total memory which is in drive 1

Thank you for trying to help me.. I don't want to waste anymore of your time.