WinXP all of the sudden not seeing my second hard drive - WTF?

[T Roosevelt]

I have two hard drives - they show up in the BIOS, and in the Device Manager. However, I cannot access the secondary HD, and it is not showing up in the Disk Management.

When I try to run PartitionMagic, I get an Init failed: Error 702.

When I run PartitionInfo, it appears that I've lost all logical partition information.

How do I get them back?

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

1. Go here

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

This is an excellent partiton recovery utility. I've used it successfully multiple times.

On edit: A moment's further reflection gives me pause: XP should see your second hard drive even if it has no partition. There may be something else happening. Perhaps your disk has failed. I still recommend buying and running the above utility first to see if that corrects it. If it doesn't, do you have a second computer you can put the drive in temporarily to see if it can be seen?

One other trick: sometimes a "bad" disk will be seen properly if installed using an external USB drive case. I have a 200gb drive that my computer will not see. However, I put it in a USB case and my computer sees it fine.

[T Roosevelt]

2. XP sees the physical hard drive

it just doesn't show the partitions...

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

3. In that case, the recommended utility will probably work

It's easy to use, and it's not an expensive tool.

[T Roosevelt]

4. Any tricks to it?

Just put it on a bootable floppy and go to it?

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

5. It's pretty straightforward

There's a complete instructional page on the web site, with screenshots. It's easy to follow.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/screen.htm
http://www.partition-recovery.com/manual.htm

[T Roosevelt]

6. Is it better to boot to the floppy and run it, or boot to the XP prompt?

It is my D: drive that has problems, so I can boot into XP.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

7. It must be booted via a floppy

It directly accesses the hard drive. Read the manual (link in previous post). Chapter 2 details the creation of a bootable floppy.

A further note: if you don't have a way to create a dos boot floppy, here is a link where you can download an image:

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

(You can download the demo version of the Active@ Partition Recovery utility before you buy it to see if it will detect your missing partitions so you don't waste your money unnessesarily.)

[T Roosevelt]

8. Success...kind of

I guess the hard drive was getting ready to fail spectacularly (the SMART test is now showing failure). One of the partitions mysteriously disappeared, but I managed to recover it and get most of my files off. Unfortunatly, I lost all my mp3 files (40GB) - shouldn't have let XP do it's check on startup. Oh well...

Thanks for all your help. I'll add this file to my emergency recovery collection.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

9. Glad to be of sovice. Now, about my fee...

Just kidding. I mourn the loss of your music. I have somewhat over 12,ooo songs on my own hard drive, but they are all backed up on cds...