Slave Drive has no drive assignment after XP reinstall

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I had been forced to reformat my C drive and reinstall XP Pro. All updates
loaded.

After the reinstall, my slave (D drive) wasn't assicned a drive letter. It's
visible and listed as 'Healthy (Active), (baxic, NTFS) it even gives me the
volume name. Prior to the reformat/reinstall it was working fine.

When right clicking on the disc, I have only the option of converting it to
a 'dynamic disk'. I have physically unplugged the HD and rebooted, then
reinstalled it manually. have disabled and uninstalled it via windows .

I'm at a total loss what to do now. Obviously before the reformat, I putr
anything of value (such as documents etc) onto D drive. I do not want to
reformat it,. :)

Can anyone rescue me? please?
many thanks
Monika
 
In disk management, right click in the lower drive window. You will see
options that you do NOT see when you click on the drive designator to the
left of the drives visual.

Also, if the secondary drive is partitioned/formatted as a primary partition
(and subsequently hidden) disk management will see the drive but the only
option you have available is to delete the partition.

You can use Partition Magic to change the drive into a logical partition and
unhide it, which will make it always visible to the operating system. BTW, I
do this on purpose to protect data that I don't want the O/S to ever touch.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 
Make sure the jumper pins on the drive are properly set.In xp install xp cd,
exit the info page,restart computer,boot to xp cd,recovery,press enter key
for
password,then type:DiskPart In DiskPart,delete the partition on the slave
drive,
then create one,then press Esc key,Then type:FORMAT D: /FS:ntfs D: being
the new drive,once its thru,type:EXIT Let xp restart,remove xp cd.
 
Damn it Andrew. ***STOP THIS NOW***!!!!!

The person SPECIFICALLY says she doesn't want to format the drive. So you
have her deleting the partition, creating a new partition and then
formatting the new partition.

It is obvious now that you "giving out" very DANGEROUS INFORMATION ***ON
PURPOSE*** -CONTINUALLY!

You are a dangerous threat my friend, much worse that any trojan or virus
that a person may get on their computer. I pity the person who ever does
what you suggest!


--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 
Monika,

There are three different areas within disk management where you can right
click on a drive/partition and you will see substantially different options.
If you click on the left of the window in the drive area (drive 1, drive 2
etc) you will see options to work with the entire drive.

If you right click on a partition/drive in the upper pane or the lower
window you will see different options.

Where are you right clicking and what are your options in each area?

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 
Hi Richard,

I've right clicked on every area I can think of, the only options I get are
to partition the drive or make it a dynamic disc. I've screen captured it all
but there seems to be nowhere to upload the images so I can show you. Is
there anywhere I an send them to you so you have an idsea of what I'm talking
about?

The disc was never removed to cause the cable to bend or come loose. (I only
disconnected it later in the futile hope that XP would recognide the drive
again when reconected.... zip!). I didn't mention before that the slave drive
is a seagate baracuda 80G and the Masteris a smasung 120G. Ive reformatted in
the past with no problem (and with the same drives).

The only other solution I can think of is to remove the slave and make it an
external drive, which defeats the purpose of having a slave drive and less
mess on an already messy work area. :)

Thankyouso far for your help. Any other ideas I can try?

cheers
Monika
 
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your suggestion, but repatitioning the drive isn't an option at
this time. My 'life' is on the slave drive, everythng of value from the
master before I formatted it.
If you have any other ideas I'd be most grateful.

cheers
Monika
 
There are a couple of things you can try. One is as expensive as h**l. The
other is labor intensive, and expensive as h**l for the software.

First thing is don't do anything to the drive you want to try to recover. If
the drive contains very valuable (to you) information i.e.: wedding photos,
videos of a passed relative/friend etc. I would certainly consider sending
the drive to an organization such as Drive Savers at
http://www.drivesavers.com/ or OnTrack at http://www.ontrack.com/. Their
services are NOT inexpensive.

I use the OnTrack software in my small business of computer repair. It is
called EasyRecovery Professional, available from http://www.ontrack.com/. It
also is very expensive. It has special recovery modules for accidentally
formatted partitions, drives that have lost their partition structure (these
usually read as RAW in disk management) and others. I have been very
successful recovering customers files with this program.

To recover files with EasyRecovery Professional, you need another drive with
free usable space equal to, or exceeding, the total size of the files you
are attempting to recover. You have to put the recovered files somewhere,
right!

If you were to tell me that you have backed up your information to an
external, safe destination, there are other things you can do. The problem
is if you mess up, all the information on the drive may be corrupted -
permanently.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 


Monika said:
Hi Richard,

I've right clicked on every area I can think of, the only options I get
are
to partition the drive or make it a dynamic disc. I've screen captured it
all
but there seems to be nowhere to upload the images so I can show you. Is
there anywhere I an send them to you so you have an idsea of what I'm
talking
about?

The disc was never removed to cause the cable to bend or come loose. (I
only
disconnected it later in the futile hope that XP would recognide the drive
again when reconected.... zip!). I didn't mention before that the slave
drive
is a seagate baracuda 80G and the Masteris a smasung 120G. Ive reformatted
in
the past with no problem (and with the same drives).

The only other solution I can think of is to remove the slave and make it
an
external drive, which defeats the purpose of having a slave drive and less
mess on an already messy work area. :)

Thankyouso far for your help. Any other ideas I can try?

cheers
Monika
Click to expand...


Monika:
In addition to trying Richard's suggestions, before going the third-party
recovery route, try this...

Perform a Repair install on XP with both drives connected. You sound quite
knowledgeable so I presume you know how to undertake that operation. It's
not particularly difficult to perform, but if you've had no prior experience
with a Repair install, just do a Google search on "xp repair install" and
you'll be pointed to many websites that have detailed step-by-step
instructions on the process. There's a chance that your reinstallation of XP
that apparently triggered this situation may have gone awry, so that the
Repair install might resolve the issue. Seems to me it's worth a try. Do
make sure that *before* performing a Repair install, you do back up to
removable media any of your important or critical data files.

Not to belabor the issue, but you're *absolutely* certain that your Slave
drive is properly configured/connected, yes? And have you run a diagnostic
test on that drive? You didn't indicate the make of the drive, but virtually
every manufacturer has a freely-available diagnostic utility for their
drives. I know it certainly doesn't sound like hardware problem based on
the info you provided, but one never knows for sure...
Anna
 
Monika:
In addition to trying Richard's suggestions, before going the third-party
recovery route, try this...

Perform a Repair install on XP with both drives connected. You sound quite
knowledgeable so I presume you know how to undertake that operation. It's
not particularly difficult to perform, but if you've had no prior
experience with a Repair install, just do a Google search on "xp repair
install" and you'll be pointed to many websites that have detailed
step-by-step instructions on the process. There's a chance that your
reinstallation of XP that apparently triggered this situation may have
gone awry, so that the Repair install might resolve the issue. Seems to me
it's worth a try. Do make sure that *before* performing a Repair install,
you do back up to removable media any of your important or critical data
files.

Not to belabor the issue, but you're *absolutely* certain that your Slave
drive is properly configured/connected, yes? And have you run a diagnostic
test on that drive? You didn't indicate the make of the drive, but
virtually every manufacturer has a freely-available diagnostic utility for
their drives. I know it certainly doesn't sound like hardware problem
based on the info you provided, but one never knows for sure...
Anna
Click to expand...


Good additional points Anna!



--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 
Hi, Monika.

If your Disk Management is set up like mine (the Volume List on top and the
Graphical View at the bottom), you should see the list of hard drives down
the left side of the Graphical View. Note that these are listed by NUMBER
(Disk 0 and Disk 1), not by Letter (C:, D:, etc.). To the right of each
Disk # box should be one or more graphical boxes representing the volumes
(primary partitions and logical drives) on that disk. As I'm sure you know,
"drive" letters are misnamed; a letter applies only to a volume on the
physical drive, not to the whole disk, even if it has only a single volume
using all the space on the disk.

If you right-click on the Disk 0 box, you should see the context menu you
mentioned, with "Convert to Dynamic Disk..." as the first option. A
right-click on a Volume box produces a different context menu which does not
include the dynamic disk option.

But your first message also said,
"After the reinstall, my slave (D drive) wasn't assicned a drive letter.
It's
visible and listed as 'Healthy (Active), (baxic, NTFS) it even gives me the
volume name. Prior to the reformat/reinstall it was working fine. "

Something wrong here. Disk Management shows some status labels for the HD
itself (Basic and the size of the whole physical disk); these should be on
the far left in the Disk # box. Other labels (Healthy, Active, System, Page
File, etc., plus NTFS and the size of the volume) show the "substatus" of
volumes on the disk; these should be in the boxes to the right of the Disk #
box. There should be a separate set of labels for each volume. Of the ones
you mentioned, "Basic" should be in the Disk # box; "Healthy" and "Active"
and "NTFS" should be in a volume box; they should NOT all be in the same
box!

There's a LOT of information available in the Help file reached from Disk
Management; use the Contents and follow the Related Topics links to read it.
As the Help file explains, only one of the "substatus" labels, Active,
System, Boot or Page File, can be displayed, so, "For example, if you have
only one volume which serves as the boot volume, system volume, active
volume, page file, and crash dump, its status is displayed as Healthy
(System)."

Do you see Disk 1 listed? What does it show in the Volumes area of the
Graphical Display for that disk?

Your reinstall of WinXP might have made Disk Management think you were
moving your second disk to a different computer, instead of back into the
re-installed original. You might need to read the page on "To move disks to
another computer" in the Help file, under How to...Manage disks.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
 
Thank you Richard. I see so much of this type of thing in these groups
that it just makes me want to upchuck. Usually the right answer cut
and pasted for a different query.
 
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