Missing Hard Drive???

[gileraguy]

Here's a weird one:

I have lost one of my hard drives on my computer.

When i go into "My Computer" it shows ONE of the TWO hard drives installed, but I can't find the other.

It is an old Dell and I was planning on replacing it, but i need to get data off the drive.

I have restarted the computer but found the problem was not cured. As that is the limit of my troubleshooting abilities, after doing a quick Google search, i thought i would try here.

I'm running Windows XP Service Pack 3

thanks in advance.

[A A Gruntpuddock]

The chances are that it has been marked as 'inactive' so the operating system is ignoring it. Happened to me a couple of times.

If you go into the disk management system you should be able to resurrect it or you could try the 'add new hardware' route which should send the os off to look for it.

Otherwise run a partition manager and it will display all the drives on the machine and allow you to change the drive status.

I assume. of course. that you have checked that the data and power cables are still connected.

[Loose rivets]

Go into BIOS on start up. F1 or Esc or Delete...somewhere in the first page or two it should show the drive details.

If not, the computer is not seeing it, and further investigations after XP is running will probably not find it either.

[BOAC]

As LR says, there is absolutely NO point in looking in Windows for this drive.

Start with ONLY the last line of post #2 and then do post #3 and report back.

[A A Gruntpuddock]

I added a new drive but it did not appear in Win 7 - even though it was there in the bios. Used a partition manager to find and re-activate it.

Had problems with a failed load from a disk image on a laptop - partition had vanished! Again, ran a partition manager which showed the partition was there but marked as inactive. Made it active and no problems.

Gave my son a s/h disk from ebay which would not show up, even though he could hear it running and it was visible in the bios. He downloaded a partition manager which immediately spotted the problem and fired up the disk without any intervention or input from him; worked fine after that.

So don't be so quick to dismiss the use of a partition manager.

[Saab Dastard]

In a "steady state" configuration where no changes have been made, then disk partitions don't just "vanish".

Here's some thoughts about how I would approach troubleshooting this.

If no changes have been made to the system, then it is reasonable to assume a physical problem, so checking the physical connectivity of the drive - power and data (both ends) - is the logical starting point.

Assuming that this is OK, the next stage is to check it appears in the BIOS (also check the POST messages). Failure to appear here indicates a problem with the power cable (does the HDD spin up?), HDD, HDD controller, cable, or motherboard. Discount configuration issues, as this was a working system until the failure, and no changes were made. Useful things to do include swapping the power lead, replacing the data cable, testing another disk on the interface, etc. Testing the suspect HDD on another system / external USB would be helpful also.

If the HDD appears in the BIOS, next step is to check it appears in Device Manager\Disk Drives. If not, check if the controller appears in the IDE\ATA\ATAPI controllers list. If the controller doesn't appear, the driver could be corrupted.

If it does, then proceed to Disk Manager.

Of course, you can jump in and short-circuit the process at any point.

SD

[Loose rivets]

I think there's a good argument for PM, with the caveat of partitions being rather critical in terms of total loss of data. Take care.

I would have thought the BIOS route was the place to start. Having said this, I've just put on old ESDI drive in a computer that would not boot up in the computer it had arrived in years ago. Various ribbon settings were tried. Wouldn't go as master or slave.

It had been formatted and XP loaded on another machine. Putting it back in the original produced nothing. I was convinced it was due for the trash, but on a hunch, after months, put it back into the second machine and away it went.

That drive had been F-Disk'd, but had no logical drives.

I think this would be a valid case for looking at it with PM. Sadly I can't remember exactly what the BIOS showed on the no-go machine - so not much of an example - but it did report something being there.

This had piqued my interest, so will play further when time permits.

[Avtrician]

If the drive exists under bios , but cant be seen, then there is a good chance the drive is blank (no file system on it). Using the windows disk utility ( Control Panel:- Admin tools :- Computer management:- Disk managment.)
select the drive required, create a partition then format.

Disk should now work.

[Loose rivets]

Erm . . .

I was planning on replacing it, but i need to get data off the drive.

The message is too short. So . . .