Several months ago I got a worm and and it corrupted my boot files. Finally I bit the bullet and reinstalled XP Pro with a complete hard drive wipe. I backed up all my files on my data drive, but I unplugged it during the install..once I lost my data on a second drive during a format and I didn't want to risk it. When the install was finished, I could not reboot because GoBack kept appearing at reboot, telling me to hit the space bar, which then gave me an error. I did have Norton System works installed before. I finally had to do another reinstall of XP, with a drive wipe. This time I plugged my data drive in. (As an aside, XP install never asked me to partition my drive. That's a first.) My data drive appears in My Computer as "Removable Disk D: under "Disks with Removable Storage." I checked CMOS and did an autodetect, and it is there as the Slave Drive and shows as a hard disk. I have it on IDE socket 1 and on the second plug, with the Master Drive on the end plug. I am using an 80 wire cable. I went into Computer Management and used "Disk Management" and it shows up listed under the C: drive as "Data Storage," Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active). Right clicking on it shows all selections as greyed out except the "Delete Partition" function. The C: Drive shows 127.99 GB as System and 104.89 GB as Unallocated. Shouldn't that be partitioned? Anyway, I cannot access the data drive. I open up My Computer and I click on it and get this - "Please insert a disk." I cannot explore it or rename it or reassign a path. Right clicking on it says it is functioning properly.
I found this in an older post:
"I've been fighting the drive letter not assigned problem for several hours now until I found the following over on the Experts Exchange forum, courtesy of "truenorthtn" who wrote:
QUOTE
I had the same problem. After a bit of research I figured it out. It would appear drives that have GoBack installed will not be recognized by Windows XP due to changes GoBack makes to the MBR. The solution is to simply put the hard drive back into the old computer and uninstall GoBack. This is done in two steps. First you need to hit the Space Bar while booting to access the GoBack menu. From this menu you need to disable GoBack. Once GoBack is disabled you need to load Windows and uninstall GoBack. Worked like a charm for me. "
So, I'm wondering, even though I had not installed Norton System works on the fresh install yet, somehow a ghost of GoBack was there and somehow that has something to do with my data drive being misread as removabel storage? Should I do as this person and install GoBack ( I did not do it yet even tho I installed SystemWorks) and see if that helps? I have precious data on this drive. An odd thing, just now when I went to My Computer to check it one last time before sending this post, it has disappeard from the drives listed. It's now gone! I will try a reboot and see if it is there.
Thanks.
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