Nobody Can Figure Out HD Problem ?!?!

[schultzomerta]

The motherboard went out in my old emachines desktop, which was running XP Home sp3, so I pulled the hard drive out to hopefully recover the data someday and trashed the rest of the computer. I have a new desktop running XP Pro sp3 and installed the old hard in the new desktop. I tried as a Master and Slave and neither worked! The old hard drive shows up in Bios, it shows as new hardware recognized and added when windows booted after install, it shows in the device manager as working properly and even shows in disk management screen, but without a drive letter and says unallocated. So why is my old HD not showing up in the My Computer screen and why can't I assign a drive letter to it? I just want to be able and access all my old files to burn onto DVDs so I can access the files or better yet just be able to use my old HD and access my old files whenever I want! I have searched all over and tried many things, but still no luck! PLEASE HELP!

 

[carnageX]

If you want to just get the data off, try accessing it from a Linux LiveCD. Ubuntu is pretty popular; download the ISO, burn it to a CD, and boot off of it and go into the Live CD mode.

Could also try doing a chkdsk /r on the drive to make sure its not going bad.

 

[Anarion]

Does the hard drive need initialising? In disk management right click on the drive and see if it says 'ínitialise' in the menu that appears.

 

[KSoD]

even shows in disk management screen, but without a drive letter and says unallocated.

That is the problem right there. The partition tables have been lost. If Disk Management sees it as a unallocated drive in RAW format you can not access it at all. Windows does not have the capabilities to do this by default.

I have seen some 3rd party software that might do it but most of the suggestions is to make a new partition and use file recovery software.

Try this:

Program Cannot Access a Raw Partition on Your Computer's Hard Disk

That will be your best option to get access to the drive.