hello

I have two disc drives on my PC, a 20gb C drive and a 40 gb F drive.  my C drive was full so I moved all the non essential items such as pictures and music to the F drive and ran the disc clean up and defragmenter to clear space.  now my F drive does not show up in the my computer screen.  I have gone through the help menu and the troubleshooter and got no where.  the drive does not show up in the command prompt or the disk management screens but it does show on the device manager as working properly and having no need to update a driver.

can anyone think of anything I can do to get it to show up again.  I did system restore but it said no changes would be made to the F drive as this had been disabled or removed.

Thanks

Hi Jason

thanks for that - tried it, it did find new hardware but this seemed to be just the CD drives and it did not bring back my F drive.  does this mean I have broken it completely?

Linda

Linda,

Whoops, If when you rebooted it found the CD DRives, then that means that we did the procedure to the wrong Controller. No harm done...

So this time, Do the same procedure, however this time do it to your Primary IDE Controller.   I forgot about the CD Drives.  I bet that you have the same IDE cord attached to both hard drives and then the other IDE cord must be attached to you CD Drives.

Jason

Linda,

If BIOS is able to see the drive and Windows XP cannot, then it has to be a driver issue.  You probably inadvertantly moved a required driver file when you moved files.   So the solution would be to reinstall the driver.   That's why I suggested doing the delete of the controllers and allowing Windows to reinstall the needed driver files (and to determine the appropriate drivers I need to know the specs of your system).

So, please post the specs of your system.  If you are not sure, and easy way (and free) to get this info is to use a freeware utility called Belarc Advisor.  It will scan your system and spit out the manufacturer of your Motherboard, Processor, Video Card, Disk Drives and other system specs.

Get it here:  http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html 

Hiya

both devices are set to enable write caching, however the auto detection on device type 1 is greyed out.  all other settings are as in the picture except DMA mode is 4.  I have been at work all day so I have not downloaded the specs tool, but will do so tomorrow when the kids go to school.

I am also now having problems getting it to switch on.  If I just start up normally, it sits on the windows bar for about 10 minutes then reboots just as it is about to go onto the blue page where the icons for people are.  If I log on to safe mode first and restart it will then work fully, but still sits at the status bar for at least 10 minutes.

will update again tomorrow.  thanks still for your help and thanks to my mother who pointed me at your site.

Hi Jason

I have run the belarc advisor thing and it gave me lots of info.  I am not sure which bits of this you need, the motherboard? - is this it?- Board: Quntumn Designs Limited PLATINIX-2 V1.XX Bus Clock: 100 megahertz BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG 06/05/2002?  Processor is - 1.80 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4  8 kilobyte primary memory cache 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.  Drives are - 20.51 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
9.54 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space SAMSUNG CD-R/RW SW-248F [CD-ROM drive] SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-616Q [CD-ROM drive] 3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 6E040L0 [Hard drive] (41.11 GB) -- drive 1, s/n E13EWNVN, rev NAR61HA0, SMART Status: Healthy
WDC WD205BA [Hard drive] (20.53 GB) -- drive 0, s/n WD-WM9490879035, rev 16.13M16, SMART Status: Healthy

memory modules are - 384 Megabytes Installed Memory Slot 'A0' has 256 MB Slot 'A1' has 128 MB Slot 'A2' is Empty

local drive volumes are -     c: (NTFS on drive 0) 20.51 GB 9.54 GB free .

I do not have the XP discs as the man who installed the extra hard drive for me a few years ago put in a free upgrade to XP but never gave me any discs and I am no longer in contact with him.  however it booted up ok this morning.

Thanks

 

Probably not as it looks to be a low level problem here as it is recognised in the BIOS but not by windows.  So it could be a windows driver problem.  As it only recognises drive c:  A possible solution would be to disconnect (physically ) the second unrecognised drive.  Boot, turn off, then reconnect drive 2, reboot then see if windows finds it.

I saw this one coming....It is still possible to fix this, but you will need to find someone with a copy of Windows XP.   You need the disk.  If you can find that, and follow my suggestion, you still could fix and avoid paying tons of $$$$