Hard disk assignment problem

This is a really interesting problem. A coworker of mine was having trouble with Window ME so he used his recovery disk to reinstall. When he did everything worked fine except his 2nd HD. He was using a 40 gig western digital as a storage drive for various documents and information. After the reinstallation ME no longer assigned it a drive letter. It read it as being a physical drive in device manager but would not assign a drive letter. He later upgraded to XP and had the same problem.

I then put it in my comp to see what was up. It is read as a healthy drive in XP with a partition but is not assigned a drive letter. Storage manager will show the drive with an active partition, 80% full, but only give the option to delete the partition. Did the recovery disk somehow screw up the master boot record? Is there anyway to retrieve the data or is the only option to delete the existing partition and start over? Thanks.

(To clarify in case it was muddy....this was his second HD and no operating system was ever installed on it....the problem only occured after he ran his recovery disk.)

 

If you boot to DOS is the disk seen properly?

If you can see it I would try FDISK /MBR

 

You don't need to reformat the secondary slave drive...make sure your BIOS recognises the slave drive (enter the BIOS when your computer first goes through the BOOT process and either press the Del or F1 key). You will have to manually type in the correct info into your BIOS and then save the new updated BIOS file and then when you reboot your copy of Windows ME (or XP) will then assign a drive letter but make sure the secondary drive is on the same IDE ribbon as the primary drive and that the small yellow or black square jumper, on the second drive, is inserted into the "slave" position...the jumper is located at the back of the drive, usually between the power and IDE interface slots...I hope this helps

 

Thanks....the guy actually took his HD back, but I'll have him try these. I'm really not too hopeful. The problem was very strange and he is really frustrated. He will probably reformat using his WD tools if these don't work.

 

if that drive was installed using wd's tools, then it might have used their bios to override the system bios, and the format wont get recognized on another system.

 

use the 'clear cmos' jumper on the board, to reset the bios.
should show up then

 

No, what I meant was "Pull the CMOS jumper on the motherboard ( check your motherboard manual for location)". If you haven't written any DATA about the setup configuration in a handy booklet than do it now , before you RESET (to default factory settings)the BIOS. I hope you remember all the BIOS settings from the original BIOS setup ( if you haven't written it down somewhere).
This RESET BIOS data will change to default settings, which include your Date and Time, Hardware configurations...memory settings and cpu settings, videocard config., and this includes your CD or DVD drives, floppy and HardDrives...which will have to recognised by the BIOS ,to work in Windows...After you change to the performance settings (best suited for your particular computer setup) and SAVE the BIOS and RESTART your computer then it will REBOOT and use whatever saved info is in the BIOS to start using the different hardware components so that the info is compatible with Windows or Linux...I hope this helps...