Dissappearing harddrives

[MMH]

I have been building systems for around 10 years now. I have never come accross an issue like this before.

I bought a new motheboard and proccessor.. once installed i formatted my main drive (160GB) and reinstalled XP pro. Once inside everything seemed right. my other 2 harddrives were there and available for access.

I installed the MB's drivers and rebooted. My 2 other drives had vanished. The bios was picking them up. The device manager shows all 3 hard disks. I just can't access them.

I started having all kinds of problems and I traced it down to bad memory slots and RMA'd my new board (ASUS A8N-Sli). Hoping that was causing the harddrive issue, i reinstalled my old stuff..formatted and reloaded windows again. everything worked as it always had, but... no harddrives.

I have very important data on one of those drives and no way to access it. They are all formatted NTFS so I couldn't see them in a DOS boot even if there was no problem.

If i right click on my computer and go to manage, I can view all 3 drives from there. The 2 missing drives show active, working partitions. BUT there is no drive letter assigned to them,, and the only option it gives me is to delete the partition, or convert to a dynamic disk (which dismounts the current partition).

anyone seen this before? Or have any ideas on how to correct the issue? thanks for the help in advance

 

[Sui]

hmmmm don't know for sure, but you might be able to access them with a 3rd party utility, Ultimate boot disk has a few that will read NTFS. When you click the option to change drive letter the box is greyed out?

 

[MMH]

right the option is greyed out..

I am going to go to my sister's house tomarrow and see if it will show up on her computer.

is there any software, prefferably free, that can detect and repair file system errors?

i'm starting think that the filesystem got some kind of error in it due to the faulty board.. like i said before. i was able to access CPUz from my second HDD to check things out after the install.. the next reboot they were gone.

I have a 9 month old daughter and there are alot of pictures on that harddrive that have not been backed up yet.. alot of them have, but none from the last 3 months or so. its something i really don't want to lose.

Also does anyone know if there a good free utility to check for defective ram or malfunctioning ram?

 

[Sui]

Yeah thats why I was saying get a program that can get in and read ntfs. Simple google search would find like 4 or 5 different ones, download them all, one of them should work. Ultimate boot disk has I think 3 or 4, and one of them managed to work out of the 3 I tried... http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Also does anyone know if there a good free utility to check for defective ram or malfunctioning ram?

sure memtest http://www.memtest.org/

 

[shdwsclan]

Something is wrong with the file table....it could be damaged.....
Dos can actually fix the file table, unless you have cheap and crummy drives like maxtors or wds than actually have sector damage and the table is actually irreferencable....
Then you need to backup your hard drive using erd commander....because thats the only thing that worked for me, when i chucked my last WD...

 

[MMH]

Problem solved,

The ultimate boot disk is my saviour,, it will forever have a home in my important CD collection.

The file system utilities found my lost partitions and restored them.

Thank you to all of you who have helped and given suggestions.