hard drive present in device manager but not my computer

[chris54991]

i recently reformatted my main hard drive and backed up my fav. stuff to an old (couple years nothin ancient) one. I made sure everything was okay before i reformatted...i played songs, movies, etc. from that hd.

however now that im ready to move them back to the main drive after xp was installed, xp wont recognize a new drive in "my computer", yet both the bios AND device manager both see the drive as present.

another interesting note is that i used a disk rescue type program that let me view the contents of the partition, but it showed me stuff from forever ago, and not the stuff i backed up the other day. i dont know if this is relevant at all i just thought it was wierd.

any help will be greatly appreciated

[Confused]

Start > right click My Computer > select Manage > select Disk Management. From there you should see the drive and be able to allocate and make it active.
Chas

[chris54991]

the drive is present in drive manager, but the only option it gives me is to delete the partition.

im about to give up and just do that, but i want to avoid it at all costs. Is there any way i can access this thing?

[EzyStvy]

Is the NEW drive FAT32 and the old one NTFS?

If so, need to convert the new drive to NTFS...

[glc]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Is the NEW drive FAT32 and the old one NTFS? If so, need to convert the new drive to NTFS...

No, XP can read FAT32 just fine.

Can you assign the drive a drive letter in Disk Manager?

[chris54991]

negative. the only option is delete partition or help. before i re-installed xp, everything worked fine. but now the properties show no volumes on the drive...

[TheMajor]

try reformatting it, or delete it in diskmanagement and then format it

[EzyStvy]

Originally Posted by glc No, XP can read FAT32 just fine. Can you assign the drive a drive letter in Disk Manager?

Yep. But if the OS is on a FAT32 drive it can't read an NTFS drive

[Confused]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Yep. But if the OS is on a FAT32 drive it can't read an NTFS drive

The OS itself is what reads the partition and has nothing to do with the drive it resides on. WIN98 on a FAT32 partition CAN NOT read a NTFS partition but XP on a FAT32 partition CAN read a NTFS partition.
Chas

[glc]

Originally Posted by TheMajor try reformatting it, or delete it in diskmanagement and then format it

This is last resort. It looks to me like this person has all his data backed up on that drive and wants to be able to access it.

[Mesaeus]

It's normal to see very old stuff when you use a disk rescue program like GetDataBack or similar, since it can get very old data back if it's not been overwritten. But are you sure the new files are nowhere to be found ? It sounds like your partition got corrupted somehow, so the disk rescue program may be your only hope. If you didn't yet, try GetDataBack, you can download a trial version that does everything except copy the data, so if it seems to be able to get your files back you can consider buying it (if your data is worth the money). Other than that, I fear the worst.