d drive missing

I want to restore my back up c drive. I keep the back up on my snd drive (d). But d drive does not show up in my computer, making it difficult to restore. Also my other dtives have different letters

 

Welcome to Major Geeks, kencol.

I think we'll need a bit more info to give you any help that you'd want to rely on. Perhaps you missed the link in the heading for this forum, entitled "Before You Post Asking For Help, Please Read This".

Also -- what kind of drives are you talking about? How they're installed can be critical, particularly as drive letters are assigned by the OS depending on the drive type and how they're installed. Floppy drives come up as A: and B:, the first partition on the primary master hard drive will come up as C:. Beyond that -- it depends.

If you're not seeing the drive you want to see at all, it's probably not installed correctly. If it's not installed correctly, the BIOS won't see it, and the OS won't be able to assign a letter to it. So check the BIOS screen that comes up when you start your system: does the drive you want appear on that screen?

 

I am having the same problem and I hope this is the correct place to post this. Sorry for the length.

For years I have had an 80GB Western digital HD as my primary drive and a 40GB Western digital HD as my slave drive. Although the slave drive had Win 98SE installed, I was able to access the slave drive without a problem. I decided to have a HD dedicated to Video Editing so, I recently place my original HD into an enclosure to share a bay/mount with another 80 GB Western Digital in the same brand enclosure (to use as the editing HD). I still have the 40GB Western Digital HD as the slave. The video editing HD (new HD) has Windows XP Home with it's own CD Key. The primary HD (original HD that worked fine before) that shares the enclosure bay and has the original Windows XP Home with the original CD Key.

After installing the OS on the new Video Edit HD, I am able to access the slave drive (which always had and still retained the drive letter (D. When I shut down the computer and replace the new Video Edit HD with the original HD, everything appears to boot correctly, but I am unable to access the slave drive. There is no drive letter. I went to the Disk Mgmnt tool and the slave drive is recognized as (no drive letter) Disk 1, [volume] JOHNS40GB, [layout] Partition, [type] Basic, [File System] Fat32, [Status] Healthy (active), [capacity] 37.26GB, [free space] 14.91, [%free] 40%, [fault tolerance] no, [overhead] 0%. All of this appears to be normal and is the same as when the Vid Edit HD is booted-up (except there is the (D behind of JOHNS40GB).

I began having this problem after my oldest kid installed the Google Earth program. It has since been uninstalled. I tried the simple right click onto the JOHNS40GB but the only option I'm given is to delete partition. Obviously the problem is with the Windows XP on this HD and not the slave drive. Is there any way of forcing the computer to recognized the slave as a specific drive? I'm afraid of losing the information from the 80gb or the 40GB. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks John

 

jh3463 -- I see that you've started a separate thread for your post at <http://forum.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=100874>. That was the better thing to do.

Posting your problem in a thread started by someone else who is trying to resolve their problem is sometimes called "hijacking" the thread. It tends to confuse, because the result is a thread that deals with multiple problems from multiple posters all at the same time. It gets messy.

Anyway, I've responded to your post in your thread. Hopefully, we can all now use kencol's thread to deal with kencol's problem.