hard drive vanished

[X-SLaYeR]

I need some help with this one:

I was transferring some files on my network between 2 PC's running Windows XP. The PC that was receiving the files had locked up and I had to power cycle it. Once I restarted to XP, the drive that I was transferring the files wasnt showing up in My Computer. The physical disk is also not present under device manager. It is a FAT32 60GB disk. I checked the BIOS and it is there and readable. I booted with a Win 98 startup floppy and I was able to access the missing drive and its contents. I did a scandisk and it came out good with no errors at all. I restart to Windows XP and it still doesnt show.
Is it possible that WinXP has become corrupted and I need to run Setup again? I have been in Computer Management and Logical disks and rescanned for volumes, but to no avail.

any ideas?? im stumped.

[Atodini]

It looks like the drive / volume has somehow become "hidden".

Try Partitionmagic - it will tell you the status of the drive & let you "unhide" it.

Good Luck..

John

[X-SLaYeR]

strange

1. booted to win98 floppy
2. changed to drive in question
3. FDISK /MBR
4. reboot
5. WinXP dont see it
6. Start/Programs/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Device Manager/RESCAN FOR DEVICES
7. hard drive pops up and is ready for use

I would REALLY like to know just exactly what the hell just went on with this system. Does XP automatically disable and DELETE suspected 'faulty' hardware such as Hard Drives? I never saw this before!

[confus-ed]

"Mysteriously" vanishing hard drives seems to be an 'undocumented feature' of xp .... I see it quite often.

Usually a good 'dose' of updated chipset drivers & the appropriate IDE driver sorts it permanently.

This is just windoze being dumb ... When a machine starts it looks at all the connected drives & their IDE channels, its supposed to work out the maximum speed of each & fathom how fast DMA transfers can be made between them, if it finds errors in these transfers it automatically switches down the speed of the transfers between them, trouble is it can switch them off ! When it does that you end up with a missing drive, so even though BIOS sees it windoze is determined that since it got an error transfering files between them it shouldn't show, redetecting hardware as you did forces windoze to have a re-think...

[Neptin]

I am have the same problem.. I reformated and then WindowsUpdated and now my other harddrive is missing... the steps above did not however work for me. Any ideas?

[NooNoo]

Welcome to Windrivers Neptin

We need a load more details to be able to help

Does bios detect the drive correctly?
What windows version is this?
Has anyone reconfigured or just "had a look" inside your pc?
What motherboard is it (or if branded, what make and model)?

[Neptin]

Welcome to Windrivers Neptin
We need a load more details to be able to help

The drive worked fine.. its my "storage" drive.. anyway.. i reformatted my main drive and then it was still listed in my computer once that was complete. then i preformed updates through WindowsUpdate.. and someweere in those updates it got "lost."


- Does bios detect the drive correctly?
I'm not sure how to do this.

- What windows version is this?
WindowsXP SP1

- Has anyone reconfigured or just "had a look" inside your pc?
Do you mean with me knowing what they were doing? No. Nothign was done to the computer inbetween it being there and it not.

- What motherboard is it (or if branded, what make and model)?
Not sure?

[NooNoo]

When the machine starts, you get a list of devices - is the hard drive among them? Use the pause/break key if the screen goes too fast.

Is it a brand like compaq, hp, emachine?
if not go here to choose freedownload download it, run the report then paste the first half about your hardware in this thread. You do not need to paste the part about your software and licences.