I can't see my WD Hard Drive in Windows Explorer

[pancho619]

I recently formatted my main HD and reinstalled Win98/Win2k on it, when I tried to access my 45gb HD on Windows Explorer, it wasn't there, I checked all my connections and everything but it's still not coming up. I tried connecting it by itself on the secondary ide channel as opposed to being the slave drive on the primary ide channel, but nothing has worked. It was working fine last week. I got a hold of another 45gb hd and used norton ghost to copy the contents of my drive into the new one, I can see norton copying all my files and folders, but when it finished copying and I tried to access the new drive, it didn't show up in Windows Explorer either, before I had copied anything into it...I tested it and it had come up, but after the ghosting, neither hard drive shows up. What could be wrong? I don't want to format the HD because it has way too much data that I need. Can someone please help.


pancho

 

[corkyg]

It is not clear whether you are talking about two drives or one drive. My guess is that you do not have the drive jumpers set for how you have it connected. Do you see the drive during the BIOS POST test?

Also . . . different drives have different required jumper settings. IBM drives have 4 . . . most have 3. The standard ones are Master, Slave and Cable Select. IBM adds a MASTER stand alone as a opposed to Master w/Slave. If those settings do not match up their connection condition, the drive will not be seen.

 

[pancho619]

I can see the drive during the BIOS Post Test, I can even see the hard drive in Bios, it is detected as a slave. I was using the same setup last week before I had to reformat my main drive, so I didn't change any of the jumpers, I will try again and check the jumpers, but I've alraedy tried that. Any other advice is certainly welcome. Thanks corky-g.


pancho

 

[H8tank]

Look in the device mgr and make sure there are no confilcts for the HD controller, Also, if the drive is seen by the bios, but not windows, this means it either has a corrupted FAT or is not formatted. FYI.

Try booting to a floppy and check FDISK to see what it labels this HD as, also see if you can run a scandisk from DOS on this drive.

 

[pancho619]

If the FAT is corrupted, is there a way to fix it without losing any data, because I have too much precious data on that hard drive.


pancho

 

[pancho619]

I fixed my problem by unhiding the hard drive using Partition Magic. Problem solved and everything is up to speed.



pancho