Hard drive no longer visible

[Dazzer]

The hard drive with my C-drive on it can no longer be seen by my computer.
The drive (1st drive) is there in the bios.
The drive can be seen by Acronis and fortunately Acronis can see and read the partitions on that drive. I've managed to back up the partitions and the data.

Acronis and/or disk manager has caused my c-drive (partition1) to be partially erased I think.

I noted prior to this issue that when I restore a drive/partition using Acronis, disk manager sees phantom unallocated space or phantom free space roughly corresponding to the partition I am restoring too. That's as well as successfully restoring the partition.

Trying to remove these phantoms is what's messed up my c-drive.

Now how do I resurrect my C-drive and keep the other partitions that are still intact on that hard drive?

Trying XP repair only sees my W2K boot which thankfully is on the 2nd hard drive. It does not see any of the XP builds that were on the 1st hard drive ie it can't read any partitions on that drive. (There's a few builds as I was moving the XP to a larger partition, and was having problems as it was keeping the drive mapping and shortcuts to e: - but that's another issue)

How can Acronis read the partitions if XP can't?

My boot file is still intact despite it, I guess, being on the c-drive. But it'll only boot W2K and none of the XP builds that are on the 1st drive.

What's the name of the boot file? Hopefully I can find it in my Acronis back up.

But is the best of action to resurrect the 1st drive and keep the partitions intact to try and re-install XP on the c partition, the 1st partition of the 1st drive, if it'll see it?

Otherwise what's best to do to fix the drive? Other than wipe it and start again, which may be better.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Darryl

[glc]

Recover your data, zero out the drive, and start fresh - and keep it simple.