HD disappeared after SP2 installed

[zmanb213]

OK. hopefully somebody can give me a hand with this. A few months ago i installed a second hard drive for a buddy of mine who needed additional storage space on his xp pro machine. 2 weeks ago he installed SP2 and now he cant access the second hard drive. I havent been able to go look at the PC but the HD shows up in bios and device manager. Does anyone know what he can do to access the drive? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Swylen]

I got it back using testdisk. http://www.cgsecurity.org/
It scanned the physical drive and allowed me to load the NTFS backup MBR file and write it back to the front. When I rebooted I had my drive back. Though I am currently unable to get through a complete cycle of scandisk. It locks up 4/5 of the way through phase 4. That worries me some but I have access to my critical files and will move them and reformat completely. Just to be safe.

 

[zmanb213]

Ok. That sounds promising. Thanks. So aside from scandisk failing are there any other querks you ran into after running testdisk?

 

[Swylen]

Actually, I had not luck with norton disk doctor. but the windows error checking scan did eventually work. It came out error free. It just took many many hours which made me think it was stopping. It must have been doing a thorough free space scan. The interface to testdisk isn't that clear but you just select the disk you want to fix and select analyze. Then search. Then Load (backup MBR). And finally Write (to put backup in place). Reboot and your good to go.