[m5fromns]

Today my master hard drive bit the dust. It was a 15 GB Maxtor Hard drive. I have a 160 GB Western Digital Slave that was on the same IDE cable as the master. When I set up a new 40 GB drive to be the master and attached it to the IDE cable the bios and device manager read them both it but when I go to My Computer the slave drive is not there to access. I tried right clicking on My Computer and clicked on manage and then clicked on 'Disk Management' and it shows up there but will not allow me to add a drive letter. It says I need to add a partition. I don't know what to do but the files I have on that drive are very important. I have been trying all day to get it to work. If you can help that will be more then great. I am running Windows XP home edition. Thanks.

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You say your Master drive isn't working but somehow you are booting to Windows. This cannot be ! The master drive always holds the operating system and you cannot boot without this. Whatever drive that is allowing you to boot to windows IS the Master and IS working. Any second drive that you add on that IDE channel must be set to be the Slave drive.

Please check the settings on the drive and to which IDE channels that are attached.

[WinCrazy]

You say your Master drive isn't working but somehow you are booting to Windows. This cannot be ! The master drive always holds the operating system and you cannot boot without this. Whatever drive that is allowing you to boot to windows IS the Master and IS working. Any second drive that you add on that IDE channel must be set to be the Slave drive.

Please check the settings on the drive and to which IDE channels that are attached.

[m5fromns]

The new master drive IS working once I loaded Windows. The Slave drive is the one not working. It is not showing up in My computer and I cannot access it.

[HaraldR]

Are the jumper settings on the master set to master or csl(cable select)
the slave drive also should be a slave not csl.?
ensure master at end of ide and slave in between (next connector from master)?

[m5fromns]

The master jumper is set to master and the slave jumper is set to slave.

[HaraldR]

try a swap of slave hd to slave position on cd/dvd drive ide instead of hd ide
restart system

[HaraldR]

Have you installed sp2?
if not winxp won.t see +137gb

weastern digital should have fix patch as well

[austin_o]

Try changing the EIDE ribbon cable. I had a similar problem once and it turned out to be the cable.

[m5fromns]

I did change the ribbon but it works fine and is not the problem. I did install SP2 but the slave drive still doesn't show up in My computer nor can I access it. I am starting to think I will have to format the drive in order to use it. Any other ideas?

[HaraldR]

last set jumper to master on 160 plug it in place of cdom if still cannot see drive then I suspect damage may not limited to one drive

[m5fromns]

Thats a good idea. I will set the slave 160 to master and the master (OS) to slave and boot from the slave. Maybe it will give me a better idea of what I am looking at. Another thing, when I view the drives in the Computer Management screen it says that 149.5 GB (which is how full the disk was) is Unallocated. What exactly does that mean? I'm pretty sure I know but I want to be certain. Thanks.

[HaraldR]

the allocation tables on the disc are corrupt so win cannot see files hence unallocated (but they are there)

[HaraldR]

Google: HDD Regenerator
handy free prog to fix bad sectors etc

[m5fromns]

Is there anyway to repair them or is that pretty much the end of the line for me and my files?

[HaraldR]

there are a lot of fixes fron simple regeneration to dismantling hd and recovering discs(rather expensive)

Not yet time to give up