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wasatchcars

Hard Drive Help please

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If any of you can help me it would be GREAT.

I have a 2nd hard drive in my desk top used basically just for storage.

I all ways keep it backed up on a external drive.

I was doing my back up to the external drive when the internal drive froze up in the middle of backing up.

Now in the my computer screen that drive is gone?

Is there a way to get it back?

Or is the drive just toast?

I am not worried about the data as I back up a lot so the loss is vary minimal but I would like to get the dive back.

I am running XP on a HP computer.

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Open explorer, right click "My Computer" and select manage. (or Computer Management from Administrator tools on the control panel)

Go to disk management and see if the second drive shows up there, if not, it's toast. If it does show up, check to see if there is a valid partition and if it's been assigned a drive letter. Sometimes the drive letter gets removed by a virus or other apps that don't behave properly.

Worse case, pm me and I can take a look at your system from here...

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re-boot the computer,see if it shows up. It could be a bad drive, or something else. Is it on the same cable as the 'c' drive?

Go to disk management and see if it is still showing up there. report back.

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Make sure you reboot and check in disk management again. If a drive loses power or IDE/SATA connectivity it will not remount until a reboot is forced. :thumbsup:

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probably toast...but I have seen, a time or two...the cable work lose just enough to not see the drive. I had the same situation awhile back. The drive kept disappearing...and coming back. It finally came back and stayed. No idea what happened but I replaced it just to be safe. I've never had or seen a drive die suddenly like that. There are usually warning signs.

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Make sure you reboot and check in disk management again. If a drive loses power or IDE/SATA connectivity it will not remount until a reboot is forced. :)

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

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OK here is the outcome I think unless any other options I have not thought of.

I rebooted several times opened the case and cleaned & reconnected power & ribbon.

Its still not there so I guess its dead :thumbsup:

Strange it died in the middle of doing a back up but oh well.

I really lost vary little so no big deal

most my stuff was already backed up.

but let this be a lesson to every one

BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP

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always best to keep an eye on your system event log, if you do, you may have seen it logging errors which would have let you know it was about to fail...

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Do you still have to strap the Hard Drive for CS, IDE1 or 2? Also, change the cable so only one hard drive per cable, and the end of the ribbon cable.

Try putting a boot disk if you have one even if it's an older OS. After booting with a boot disk, you'll get a dos prompt and see if you can CD to each drive. You should also see each drive in the CMOS. When booting up press and depress F1 some computers use F2. Don't change anything unless you know what you're doing.

Only check to see if it sees the different IDE drives. Beware that they do have new drives out there called Sata, and Eata I think.

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Most of that I don't understand.

But I do remember when I put the drive in it did not show up and I had to do something that forgot after right clicking my computer.

I just went there and in device manager/disk drives it shows a drive in position 1 and another in position 2. so I guess it might still be alive

I cant tell what disk is what so I don't want to mess with then and kill my c drive.

I am running xp on a older hp computer.

When this happened I was doing a complete back up to an external hard drive.

The computer completely froze up for over 1/2 hour I could not get it to shut down or reboot nothing.

So I did a vary bad thing I pulled the plug so I could reboot.

I am just wondering now if I just need to get the computer to recognize the drive again?

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drives can disappear when the partition gets damaged. try this :

restart the PC in safe mode  dos prompt (hitting F5 til the options screen shows up).

type "FDISK"  without quotes it's usually located in windowssystem32 directory

read the options & view the drive partitions for each drive.

if the drive is there but the partition isn't then it's propably a damaged partition

if the drive is not there then it's a bad drive.

in either case let a technician fix it.

everything in FDISK is  immediate so go slow. you may need to run a partition manager such as "Partition Magic" if you don't find fdisk.

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One thing i love about the computer industry, everyones an expert

Still trying to figure out why I had to spend over 30 years at 16 hours a day to get where I am when almost everyone else becomes an expert simply by going to best buy and purchasing a gateway or an emachine :thumbsup:

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Not sure what you mean?? I've been a tech since 1980. & I have a Bachelor in MIS and Marketing, But I don't consider myself an expert, just a talented amateur. Gee I mis my Radio Shack CoCo, and my first 8086, and what fun was my first Vax, and that cool PDP11. Or the first Thermal Printer I took appart. and my first Sony 11000 (the first true hand held mini pc).

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One thing i love about the computer industry, everyones an expert

Still trying to figure out why I had to spend over 30 years at 16 hours a day to get where I am when almost everyone else becomes an expert simply by going to best buy and purchasing a gateway or an emachine :thumbsup:

you don't have to be an expert to offer suggestions.

experience teaches something,after all.

oh..if you work 16 hours a day, you seriously need to get a life.

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One thing i love about the computer industry, everyones an expert

Still trying to figure out why I had to spend over 30 years at 16 hours a day to get where I am when almost everyone else becomes an expert simply by going to best buy and purchasing a gateway or an emachine :)

you don't have to be an expert to offer suggestions.

experience teaches something,after all.

oh..if you work 16 hours a day, you seriously need to get a life.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: - Brainstorming never hurts, you just pick the best option that someone might not have thought of

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Well i wont argue the point about needing a life but loving what ya do is a life itself!  ;D

Besides, dont have that much time left in this life, and plans to take over have fallen behind, need to double my efforts! :thumbsup:

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