New problems with second drive, need ideas

I have an older system currently running XP SP3. It has two physical drives. One is a WDC with a primary partition (C and an extended partition with one logical drive (D The other is a 260 GB Maxtor with only an extended partition and two logical drives (E and (F

Following a malware attack, in the process of recovering from it, volumes E: and F: disappeared from Windows Explorer. I can not access them from a command shell or any windows application/utility.

- I can see the Maxtor drive in Device Manager, and when I open its properties, in the Volumes tab it originally shows no information. When I try to populate it, it says that the disk is of unknown type, not initializd, a partition style of "not applicable", and all space unallocated.

- In Computer Management\Disk Management the drive appears as Disk 1, again not initialized.

- A restore to a point before this happened, did not resolve it.

- I am aware of a registry setting that can hide drives,
9HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\NoDrives ) and made sure it was set properly. (This value is what group policy editor modifies. per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555438) Pretty clear that this isn't the problem.

- An automated system recovery from the install disk did not resolve the problem.

- A reinstall of XP did not resolve the problem.

- Booting into the system recovery console, I can access both volumes.

- I have the Winternals ERD utility and can boot into it & attach to the Windows XP installation. when I do that I can see and access these volumes.

These last two points suggest this is not a hardware or drive problem, but a windows internals issue.

This combination of hardware has been working without incident for a couple of years. There are no relevant errors in Event Viewer. SuperAntispyware reports the system is clean.

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas about what else I can look at?

 

fixmbr might work, A linux distro with ntfs-3g (reads and writes ntfs files) might be able to copy info on partitions to an alternative location before proceeding. I have used fixboot, but have never gotten past the warning for using fixmbr. hope you work it out, malware bites :boxing.

 

I'm pretty sure that it won't, because the drive has no primary partition, thus is not bootable, and so wouldn't really have an MBR. But I'm willing to be told I've got that wrong, if I do.