I have no idea what the hell has happened... but my second hard drive that simply had music and photos on it has just dissapeared without trace from my computer.... I have no idea what the hell is going on. I just can't access it. however when I start up its detects it? Has anyone got any advice as I really do not have enough knowledge about this kinda thing Edit: I just went into device manager and scanned for hardware and it appeared. but whenever i restart its gone again... Is this the sign that my hard drive is about to die on me?
right click on My Computer > Manage... go to "Disk Management" and see if the disk is assigned proplery in there, right clicking on the disk in question will give you all the options you may need
Might've lost its drive letter somehow. As mentioned by will., go to disk management and check the disk's there.
Have you installed the drive lately, reformatted or even opened/removed the drives in the recent years...
npe its been there since i installed xp. its always been the secondary drive. I've just noticed that one is FAT32 and the other NTFS.. Would that cause any problems?
Reminds me of a friend of mine, who once said on IRC (it's quoted on bash.org too somewhere) And about the FAT / NTFS, don't worry, Windows XP handles both just fine.
If I were you, I'd get that drive into another computer and pull off the data as soon as possible. Also, is this an internal IDE or SATA hard drive? If you shutdown and power up again does the icon come back with full read/write access? How about if you just restart? Last, try booting off a cd and see if you are able to access the drive either in DOS or something like WinPE or knoppix. -edit Taken from http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-28922.html In Device Manager remove the IDE Controller for that IDE Channel. Reboot, and then upon rebooting, the IDE Controller will be reinstalled. You may have to reboot again after that, but that's how I got my Optical Drives back (it was my optical drives that disappeared, and not my hard drives).
