Hard Drive that was used before not detected or accessible in Windows 7
- by Anders
Hello SU:
My PC crashed for some unknown reason, and I am still working on what caused that. However, I pulled my main (windows) drive from my computer and hooked it up to my roommate's machine and was able to pull the data I needed off of it (i.e. the drive is good).
I hook up his drives as they were, I had to turn off his machine and unplug his secondary drive to hook mine up, boot his machine and there is no second drive available in windows explorer. I opened Device Manager to see if for some reason it's drive letter got un-assigned, but there is nothing listed in there except his primary hard drive, his optical drive and one other optical drive which I believe is the virtual drive Daemon Tools made. The drive shows up in the BIOS, however after I restarted his machine again it sits on the "Entering setup....." screen at the load window.
The only thing I can think of is that may have messed with stuff is I used this tutorial to create a bootable XP install on a USB drive to install XP on my machine (I am 99% certain that the optical drive in my PC is broken) and maybe it used the other hard drive's letter for the USB drive for some reason, which doesn't make much sense since it was recognized it as a different drive letter before I started the process. It is possible that it used the secondary hard drive's letter for it's work, but once again I am uncertain.
Where should I go from here? He his bound to wake up within the next several hours and will probably flip a lid if I cannot get some sort of handle on this. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
PS: Anyone who helps me get this situated has a beer or two on me, as long as you are in the greater metro Detroit area, or don't mind traveling a bit!
