Possibly part formated hard drive in error

[Kevin R]

Brought new WD hard drive and wehen installed formatted and XP loased I must say works well.

My problem is that I had swapped my old drive with my new drive, put the old drive is 2nd connector in the ide cable and then started to load windows XP. All was going well when the system detected a problem. I had looked for jumpers but had not changed anything. I then took out the old drive and as I said loaded XP onto the new cleand drive without any problems

I then found the jumpers on the old drive moved these so this disk reads as a slave drive. I amended the bios so and it reads that a drive is there showing size of drive and cylinders etc but I can not see it in Explorer.

Have I formated in error and is there any data recovery programmes service any one could recommend

thanks

Kev :oops:

[mattk]

possibly the partition table has corrupted.

see if you can see the disk in disk management.

click start and run.

type "diskmgmt.msc" into the run box and press enter (without quotation marks)

if it is in here then more than likely the partion table has corrupted or the drive letter has been removed.

advanced bit:

open a command promt and type "diskpart"

type list vol (this will give you a list of disks, their id's and drive letters)

if your drive has no drive letter then select it by typing "select disk *" (where star is the disk number reported in the list)

then type "select partition 1"

then type "assign"

"exit"

"exit"

this should bring you back to desktop and hopefully your drive has appeared in my computer. try to access it, if it fails try a chkdisk on it. if that fails then reformat it. if theres any valuble data on it get a data recover utility to attempt to get back what you have lost. < do this before formatting the drive. :-p

hopefully this helps