Reformatted my primary hard drive, now my secondary hard drive doesn't show up

[mugs]

Reformatted and reinstalled XP SP2 on my 120 GB primary hard drive. When I was setting it up, I noticed that my 160 GB secondary hard drive was showing up as unformatted space. I continued and reformatted my 120 GB drive but didn't touch the 160 GB drive. Now my 160 GB drive is not showing up in XP.

It's a Maxtor drive, so I downloaded MaxBlast for Windows. It said large disk support was not entirely enabled, so it did that and restarted. Still doesn't show up. I didn't go too far into the MaxBlast software because I don't want to reformat the drive.

My 300 GB drive in an external USB enclosure shows up, and it has shown up since the first time I booted the system after reformatting.

Any suggestions for how to make this drive show up WITHOUT reformatting it? I don't want to lose what's on it. I tried putting it in my wife's computer, it gave me an error about failing to start the OS. I'm thinking it may have been trying to boot from my 160 GB drive instead of her drive... (her two drives are SATA drives, so this was the only PATA drive in there... I don't know if that would affect which drive it tries to boot from).

Anyway, I'd appreciate any help with getting my system to recognize this drive without reformatting it.

 

[CrispyFried]

stick it into the external enclosure and see what it says.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
stick it into the external enclosure and see what it says.

Yeah, I also tried it in the external enclosure (on my wife's computer), didn't work.

 

[Neos]

Did the hard drive show up in the bios?

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Neos
Did the hard drive show up in the bios?

Yeah. It shows up in Device Manager in Windows too. It just doesn't mount in Windows because it thinks it's unformatted.

 

[Navid]

Right click "My computer" and select "Manage". Click on "Disk Management".
What do you see on the right pane?

Did you ever change security permissions on the content of your 160G drive before the reformat?

 

[Genx87]

You need to import the disk back into XP.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Navid
Right click "My computer" and select "Manage". Click on "Disk Management".
What do you see on the right pane?

Did you ever change security permissions on the content of your 160G drive before the reformat?

I'll do this when I get home from work. I never changed any sercurity permissions.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Genx87
You need to import the disk back into XP.

How do I go about doing this?

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Navid
Right click "My computer" and select "Manage". Click on "Disk Management".
What do you see on the right pane?

Did you ever change security permissions on the content of your 160G drive before the reformat?

I put the disk into my work computer and did what you said, it shows up as all unallocated space.

 

[Genx87]

go into your disk management console under computer management. You will see the disk in there with an "!". Right click and select "import disk".

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Genx87
go into your disk management console under computer management. You will see the disk in there with an "!". Right click and select "import disk".

Unfortunately I don't get that. This is what I see:
diskmanagement.gif

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: Genx87
go into your disk management console under computer management. You will see the disk in there with an "!". Right click and select "import disk".

Unfortunately I don't get that. This is what I see:
diskmanagement.gif

I don't understand how this could have happened without you deleting the partitions from the drive! Keep bumping this until someone explains what could have caused this.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Navid

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: Genx87
go into your disk management console under computer management. You will see the disk in there with an "!". Right click and select "import disk".

Unfortunately I don't get that. This is what I see:
diskmanagement.gif

I don't understand how this could have happened without you deleting the partitions from the drive! Keep bumping this until someone explains what could have caused this.

Someone on Gottadeal recommended a program that recovers lost partitions, and it appears to be working!

 

[montag451]

Would you like to share that piece of information with us?

 

[imported_Gunhoe]

Yea, I had something similar happen to me a few months back. The drive just stopped showing up in windows. I used a program called Get Data Back to pull the info off the drive, reformated it and it works fine.

I'm not keeping anything valuable on that drive any more to be safe.