Lost a partition...how do i get it back

[Modge]

Ok here's the deal. I have two HD's and they boot off of a controller card. I had a cdrom on the mainboard secondary ide (set to master) and my burner as slave. Nothing was on the primary ide on the Mobo. Now i put the cdrom on primary ide mobo and the burner on secondary ide mobo (as master). Previously to adjusting this i had 4 partitions on my first HD. C, D, E,and F. the cdrom and burner were H and I respectively. Now after making the adjustment my burner was assigned drive D removing my partition D without reassigning it to a new letter, so i changed the letter of my burner to "I" as it had previously had been. Now my comp. doesn't recognize the partition at all. I also dual boot with win98 and 2k. Is there any way to get this partition back or at least salvage the data that's on it?

Help is greatly appreciated.

 

[mastertech01]

Try simply restoring it back the way it originally was so the partition wont be hidden.

 

[DavidWright]

Adding a CD-ROM should not cause the partition to disappear.
I regularly slot hard drives in and out.
I have two CD-ROMs and upto 3 drives with 4 partitions on each.

Has your partition disappeared or is it behaving as if it is not formatted?
If your partition has disappeared, then you should easily be able to un-hide it.
Each partition has a "hide" flag which when active, makes it invisible to the OS.

It is not clear to me what you have.
I like to use "Paragon Partition Manager" to easily manipulate the state of my partitions.
Search the web for it.
I use the demo version which does everything except resize.
With it you can easily hide or un-hide any partition.
You need to re-boot after you un-hide for the drive letter to come up.

 

[Wik]

In Win2K go into Admin tools computer management and click on Disk manangement. Here you should be able to see all of your drives and partitions and what state they are in. You might be able to make the partition active. If not get PQ magic to do so.

 

[earthman]

If you install a CDROM or zip as a master IT WILL APPEAR AS THE D: DRIVE. Masters are listed first, then slaves. If you boot with the zip disk out it will be dropped out of the lineup though, at least on my system. If I boot with a disk inserted, its D:, if I boot with it empty, its F:...
None of this explains why the partition would become invisible, though.