Slave HDD not visible in XP home.

After battling with a virus that I could not remove I decided that the only real fix was a full reformat & clean reinstall of XP home. The install went fine. I have always run a 20gig HDD that has windows on it & also an 80gig HDD that holds our pics/music/games etc. I find now that XP isnt seeing my other HDD(80gig one). All the numers(name) is on the screen when I first boot up and I can see the HDD in device manager. Its not seen in My Computer though & I cant access it at all.

Is there anyway of getting it to run without a complete format of it or am I destined to loose the data on that HDD too?

 

Hmmm.... try this: right click My Computer, select Manage. Then double click Storage, double click Disk Management. You should get a window like the screen shot I've attached below. Look thru the lower right pane for the 80gb drive, and right click on the bold print (circled in Red in the screenshot). Click Initialize if it available. Don't worry; Windows will warn you if it wants to erase the drive so there's no chance of accidentally deleting everything. If Initialize is not available, or selecting it didn't bring up the drive in My Computer, right click in the area circled in blue or in the area of the red X in the screen shot, and select Assign Drive Letter. and assign the drive a letter. Again there's no chance of deletion... If none of this works, try rebooting. If it still doesn't show up in My Computer, power down, unplug the power cord from the back of the PC, open in up, and disconnect the 80gb drive (temporarily); unplug both the data and powr cables. Restart the PC as normal and use it for a bit. Shut down, unplug the power cord, and re-attach the drive. Boot up again and hopefully Windows will reinstall the drive. If not, post here after trying all this stuff, and we'll try some other stuff...
Good Luck!
...and welcome to Major Geeks! :major

EDIT-Couldn't attach screenshot. Here's a link to it:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=80378&d=1200377207

 

Thanks for your suggestions. I tried to do as you suggested and found that the drive was a dynamic one & could not be read by XP Home. The previous system was Pro.

I have now made it a basic disk & its working fine, although I did loose all my music Thankfully I was able to save my photos before I installed the XP home.