HELP!! Major hard drive trouble!!

[YngwieJM]

Somehow 2 of my hard drives (120 gig and 200 gig) got set to "Active" in "Disk Management" in Windows XP Home. Now both drives only show up in "Disk Management" and have no drive letters and I can't access the files on them. Right clicking on them only gives me the option to delete the partition. Do I have to lose almost 300 gigs of files!?!?!? Please help me!!!

[SaSi]

I'm not exactly sure what your problem is, as the disks must be active to be accessible. What I understand is that you have lost your drive letters for them.

Within Disk Management, if you can see the disks in the list with partitions on them, all is not lost.

First thing to try is to right click on the partition area. If you can see a meny entry "change drive letter" then you can assign a drive letter through there.

If you can't, right click on the grey area to the left (where the Disk number and icon along with disk size is shown. It should have an entry like "enable disk" which should help. If not, then, it's likely that upgrading to dynamic disks will make the disks accessible without losing data.

[racer-x]

It sounds like something overwrote your MBR, maybe virus. Did you try the drives on another computer? I use a free program called partion manager. Do a google search for it. Copy the program to a boot-floppy, boot-up and chek to see if the drives are hidden. If the are, just select them and press "H" to unhide them. save to MBR and exit. See if that helps.

Good luck!!!

[txpharoah]

Use the KB at microsoft.com

[YngwieJM]

Thanks much for the super-fast replies guys!! I'll try everything and post my results!

[YngwieJM]

I'm sorry to say that none of your suggestions worked! I don't know what else to do!

[flyingmonkey35]

you can also allways pull your drives out of your pc and hook them up to a friends pc and see if your info is still thier.

also some times a manul pull and reboot/hook back up will reasign a new drive letter to the drive. and Wala info all back.

Good luck

MonkeyBoy out

[Bob W]

Look in windows device manager and see if the drives are there and if so remove them in device manager then reboot to let windows re-detect the drives.

[YngwieJM]

WOOHOO! Just got my 120 gig back by using the floppy that came with the drive (Western Digital). I am now going to try and use the Maxtor floppy to rescue the 200 gig. Thanks for all your suggestions but none of them worked! I've never had so much trouble with my pc before!!

[txpharoah]

Ah! yes, you're using a disk-loader, drives not native to the OS without properly disc load. May have happened during and upgrade or something.

[musher70]

You know, it sounds kinda like the problem i had
recently, no drive letter, after i tried to use
partition magic 8, took me a while to figure
what to do, i used device manager to restart
drives with disc... hope that helps
try going into ad tools iin control panel, find
disc management, go from there, you might
have to reconfigure drives, but dont format, yet.
partition magic locked up while formatting, really
sucked...