What happened to my hard drive?

I encountered an infection on my PC, and in some part of the removal of the infection (or, more likely, during some part of the infection), my D drive became inaccessible in Windows. It does not even appear in my computer. It is an internal hard drive that had been functioning without any trouble prior to the infection.

I am unsure of where to proceed to fix the issue.

Here is my thread from the malware removal forum, in which a gentleman here was able to help me remove the infection. Thank you Tim W.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=238685

I highly doubt this would have anything to do with it, but I would like to add this:

Part of the cleaning procedure involved me setting the computer to "Normal Startup". When I changed it back to Selective Startup after the infection was removed, none of my old settings (which programs should run at startup, etc) had been saved. For all I know, I probably did something wrong. Again, not sure if this has anything to do with the D drive issue, but I figured I might as well mention it.

Thank you for your help.

 

I was just looking at your logs and I didn't see the D: drive in your logs. It only shows one 80gb Maxtor HD.

Try Start>Run>type in diskmgmt.msc
In the Window that opens (bottom pane with the graphs) do you see the second HD listed? If it is there, is the partition listed as NTFS does it have a drive letter assigned?

 

Thank you for responding.

The D: is not listed there.

 

Also you should always run it in normal startup, if you have apps that load on start that you dont want to, there are other and better methods to stopping those from auto starting.

 

Do you only see a Disk 0 in the graphs? No Disk 1?

 

Correct. Disk 1 is not there.

 

Between the log and disk management not showing the driveit appears it has been missing since before the malware removal.

Have you made any physical adjustments to the HD cables recently? My guess is it is not showing in BIOS either. Try hitting F1 during the gateway splash screen and going to the Advanced tab do you see an option to detail Storage or Hard Drives? See if it shows the second HD.

 

It did not show in the BIOS.

I have the feeling this issue is more to do with me than the infection. At the onset of the infection, I was having some booting issues, so I used some compressed air to remove some dust. I do not recall disconnecting any cables inside the tower, but it seems I may have. I think I disconnected the power cable for the hard drive (SATA). I have provided a picture of the current connectivity.

Just now, I tried connecting the black cord of the SATA drive to one of the power connections coming out of my master (IDE) drive. The machine would turn on, but not display anything at all. Once I disconnected that and repowered the machine, the computer booted properly. Still no additional hard drive.

Am I wrong about the power connections? I installed the drive by myself over two years ago and it worked well until now. My problem is that I have not dealt with SATA and IDE drives since then, so I don't remember what the right connections are.

If you are looking at the picture attached, what I did was connect A and B. That's when the PC did not boot into windows (nor could i access the BIOS). Am I supposed to connect C to the SATA drive? I am a little scared to fry my drive, and I should have waited for you before connecting A and B, so I am going to hold off on touching anything else.

Thank you.

 

It is a little hard to see that picture but it looks like those connections are good. (Both IDE and SATA drives each have the appropriate power and data cables attached.) I had been thinking more along the lines of IDE jumpers or position on the IDE cable as possible culprits but with only one IDE drive you wouldn't have changed that.

Is the other end of the sata cable firmly seated to the motherboard?

During cleaning did you have to set BIOS back to default settings or anything that might have changed your SATA settings in BIOS? It would be unusual for a HD to just die without notice, so I'm thinking that perhaps there is a setting for enabling/disabling SATA ports in BIOS. Your product manual didn't give much information about BIOS options.