i cant get into my harddrive

[lyssa23]

i wanted to put my operating system on a bugger harddrive

i had 3 hardrives that were all being used, a 4gb which had my operating system , a 40GB and a 50GB
i unplugged them all, removed the 4gb, and replaced it with a 10gb, plugged only it in and proceded to install my operating system, it all worked fine

i then shut my computer down, plugged in my other two hard drives and started it back up. my computer would only register the 10gb and the 40gb... i tried to add new hardware and it still wouldnt register it

i dont know that much about computers but my boyfriend does, he said my computer is still reading that its there but i cant get into it at all... ive tried quite a few different things, including plugging it into an external

someone please help me, i had at least 30gb's of important stuff on there, and really want it back


HELP ME PLEASE

 

[Baez]

You need to give a bit more detail. What is the hard drives brand what file system is it using (eg. FAT32, NTFS). I'm assuming all of these are IDE drives from the size of them. Have you tried switching the jumper on the back of the drive to different spots?

Go into BIOS and see if your motherboard is seeing it there first. If it is then it's Windows that is the problem. If you haven't tried this go to Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management on the left side side under storage. Does the drive show up there?

A couple other things you can try is changing the mode the BIOS is setting your drives to and changing the IDE ribbon cable.

 

[lyssa23]

the harddive is a maxtor model 96147u8 and is using NTFS

and yes there all IDE drives and i have tried every jumper on the back, also tried it with the 4gb(which has my old operating system) and it wont work

i tried the disk management thing too... its showing its there, but saying it is uninitialized so i right clicked on it and clicked initialize and it did nothing


now i havent tried the bios thing, but like i said before i really dont know that much, espically when it comes to the bios... my friend is trying to tell me he dont thinks it that, but who knows, if your thinking that might be something, could you tell me how to check that?

 

[atomic tofu]

ide...you don't necessarily need to try all jumpers, there's only 1 or 2 useful settings for you. Mostly you can find the diagrams online for what does what, or what is needed right on the drive

basically, you have 2 ide connections on the average mobo, each supporting 2 devices. A master and a slave on each one

You can set each ide drive to CS or cable select and the system will do the rest, provided you don't have ancient cables. The master and slave being determined by the position of the cable. let's see if I can find a diagram

(there you go)
AT Attachment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

good one from seagate:
Seagate Technology - ATA Jumper Settings

booyah
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/images/support/en/us/mxo_ata_jumpers_rev.jpg

that should do it for you in terms of physically setting things up properly...then just getting into bios and seeing if the bios sees the drives fine.

BTW...the boot drive SHOULD be the master and preferrably on the "0" position if I remember correctly. Last I did this type of tech was pentium pro days so forgive me