Hard drive not being detected in windows

[shadowg3]

Hello.
Recentley I've had my main harddrive fail to boot up, and I need to reformat it. I booted windows from my backup drive. Once in windows my main drive doesn't show up.

Is there anyway to get the information off of my main drive?

my main drive is detected as the slave in BIOS and everything shows up there, just not in windows.

 

[eyeCpc]

First look in the Disk Management tool to see if it is seen there. The appearance in the bios shows that the drive is still in working order while the partition may have lost some information making the drive invisible in MyComputer and Windows Explorer as a logical drive.

Sometimes if seen in either but not accessible you simply right click on the drive's icon and select the uninstall option followed by a full restart to see Windows detect and add new hardware then seeing the drive appear as it should.

 

[KSoD]

Start>Right Click on My Computer>Manage>Disk Management. It will be on the left side.

You can see what the screen looks like there. As Eye said see if hte drive is even recognized in there. If not you have a hook up issue. Cable lose or something like that. IF it is there could be a lost partition which would result in lost data.

Or it could jsut be that it isnt mounted.

 

[tommy2006]

this is what I usually do, I have an IDE and Sata Kit that converts the drive to USB. An external enclosure will also do too. If you run into a case where the files might be protected. Use an ERD commander disk to unlock the files (getting the disk will be the hard part).

 

[eyeCpc]

Lke Knoppix before it another method for seeing onto a drive if connected correctly while partition information is somehow lost making it invisible to Window I grab a live for cd Linux distro like the latest releases of ubuntu 7.10 and now 8.04 to see data can be rescued while booting up with a live cd.

The image here shows how accessible even an external usb drive is while booted live by that method for copying files. It can save a world of hurt to get at files, back them up, and then even repartition and reformat the problem drive to recopy things back later.



First recheck the jumper setting if an ide drive to see if that is set for the position on the cable if the drive is an ide type. If set to master while you plugged it in on the middle connector the slave or cable select jumper position would then ne needed. Check the power plug to make sure you didn't forget that and if sata then assume possible loss of partition info.

Once you are in the Administrative Tools>Computer Management section that Makaveli213 posted there double click on the "storage" item seen in the right window to open that up to see the Disk Management tool and click on that to bring up the small screen with all drives installed seen there.