cant detect second hdd

[Thontor]

I was just over at a friends house last night.. he decided he wanted to install win me.. i have the install cd.. not upgrade, but a full install so he needed to reformat his hard drive.. he does have a much larger second hard drive where we backed up stuff..

well.. in his compaq... it had the main drive which is about 4 gigs seperated into two partitions, one the c drive.. and the other was e titled "System_save"... this screwed me up from the beginning.. im not too experienced with partitions and such.. i did figure out how to remove the partitions after formating them but what i didnt do at first was create a new partition and set it to be the active on.. so with multiple reboots via a win startup disk it kept putting the temp drive it makes into the c drive.. and wouldnt recognize the main hard drive because i hadnt made a partition for it after removing the two that were there. we decided to try to use the quickrestore cd that came with the compaq.. but i didnt want it to mess up the second larger hard drive which we had used to back up information so we disconnected the ide and power cords .. (this i think was my main mistake, and the quickrestore probably wouldnt have messed with the second hdd).. well we did quickrestore and reconnected the second hard drive but it wouldnt recognize it in windows (fdisk would see it but it said there was no dos partition for the disk).. i decided to try installing win me again (the quickrestore had win98).. so i reformatted the two partitions it had recreated.. then removed them and realizing my mistake last time, this time i created a new partition for the main drive and set it as the active partition.. this was the c drive now so we got past that problem.. we were able to install winMe now (couldnt before cause it wouldnt recognize the c drive).. but we still werent able to see the second hard drive in windows.. (fdisk would still see it but no partition for it.. cant get into bios on this compaq so i cant check there)..

so thats the problem we are facing right now.. the one im stumped on.. windows isnt detecting the second hard drive because it thinks there is no dos partition for it (dos says no partition too).. but as far as i know all the data and everything should still be on the drive.. and the only way to create a partition would be to erase all that backup data.. which we dont want to do if we can avoid it..

also tried putting the second drive in a different computer, it didnt recognize any partitions either..

friends girlfriend is a computer engineer.. doesnt get off work till tonight, he might be able to help..


ADDITION:
on his the second hard drive partition information reads
Partition 1.. Status A(for active?).. Type non-DOS.. nothing under volume lable or system..
now could this mean that the data was erased? is there any way to see if any of the space is used?..

its on the same IDE controller as the main hdd.. and it is set as slave .. which i know because he had it running with the second hdd before we did this reformat..

[MadMax]

Compaq stores the BIOS on the hard drive in a non-dos partition.
Deleting the non-dos partition deletes the BIOS.
What model of Compaq do you have?

[Thontor]

its my friends computer and i think its a presario 5140.. not sure though..

you really didnt answer my question though.. if you need more info just ask

[MadMax]

To get into Setup (BIOS) try hitting F1 or F10 (works on my Presario laptop), or F12

Then maybe you set it to see the slave drive.

[Thontor]

thanks for all your help.. NOT. anyway.. got it fixed.. bye

[MadMax]

I am honestly trying to help, so check your attitude at the door.

How did you fix it?

[lynchmob]

Madmax is trying to help you,Thontor.A Compaq does have a non-dos partition that stores the bios.The best way to solve any problem is to go about it methodically.When someone inexperienced formats a Compaq hdd and needs help getting the comp to work again,anybody who knows a little about computers knows to look there first.You shouldnt burn your bridges after just 3 posts-you may want to come back and ask for help again.
lynch