cant find drive

[Talonboy]

my buddy in work cant view his drive in XP. I told him to check device manager he said theres nothing wrong in there. Is this common problem with XP , how could it check it further ?

[hudsonsmith]

You are a little vague as to the problem, i.e., type of drive, computer, etc. Is the drive identified by the bios at post? If not, check the bios settings for the ide channels. You could also try resetting the cmos to defaults. Check that the drive is cabled and jumpered correctly.

If the drive is identifed by the bios, check the advanced settings tab for the primary (or secondary) ide channel. Check that the device type is set to auto detection and that the transfer mode is set to dma if available. The current transfer mode frame should then tell you how windows is identifying the drive.

[NooNoo]

Which drive? hard, floppy or optical?

If its an hdd and it appears in disk management, has it been partitioned and formatted?

[Talonboy]

sorry its his "E" drive he told me. He said HD not CDROM drive etc. He said it came with the computer HP. The guy is really computer illiterate, if i said BIOS he would look at me like an alien. Thats what makes it hard trying to help him.

[Ya_know]

It sounds like a hidden, or protected partition. The newer compaq's I've seen have this; it houses the entire restore utility in this partition, but you can’t access it through explorer like a normal partition. There is an application that is initiated at startup, I forget which one it is, that protects this partition. If this is the same thing he has, then he doesn't need to be in the partition. Tell him to leave it alone. Call HP, they might tell you how to disable the protection, if he really must get in there...

[Talonboy]

yeah thats what i going to tell him. My luck i would tell him to do something and he would do the wrong thing and make it worse. Thanks for replys guys