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Hard Drives Inaccessible

#1 joebeaven

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 12:02 PM

Hi,

I'm using Windows 7 and I have four hard drives (C, D, F and G). They were all working fine until the D drive started having some problems so I decided to replace it before it failed. After replacing the drive I'm not longer able to access drives D or G. When I go to My Computer only C and F appear. I have tried restarting many times with the hard drives connected one at a time and with different combinations of hard drives connected, but I can only every get drives C and F to show up.

Please can someone suggest what I can do to get them accessible?

Thanks,
Joe

#2 keyboardNinja

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 12:43 PM

Were D and G just partitions on the same physical drive or were they actually separate drives?

Type the following into the Start Menu and press Enter:

diskmgmt.msc

In this Disk Management window, check to see what drives show up there.

Disk Management will show everything that is hooked up. You might have to add a drive letter to any drives that don't show up in My Computer.

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#3 joebeaven

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 01:59 PM

They are all separate hard drives. The new D drive was in the Disk Management window. I just needed to format it to get it to show up. The G drive doesn't appear, however.

#4 keyboardNinja

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 02:31 PM

Does the G drive have a letter associated with it? I can only assume that it does since you refer to it as "G drive". Try removing the drive letter, then reassigning a different letter (K or something). See what happens.

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#5 joebeaven

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 03:54 PM

It was the G drive before I replaced the D drive and it was working fine, but now it's not showing up at all anywhere. Everything's set up exactly as it was before just with the replacement D drive.

#6 MrBruce1959

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 06:40 PM

Are these drives E-IDE or SATA?

Do you have the drives all configured properly in both the system BIOS and if they are E-IDE drives are the master and slave jumpers set properly on the drives?

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#7 cryptodan

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Posted 19 March 2010 - 06:57 PM

Is it detectable in the BIOS, during the POST operation?

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#8 joebeaven

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Posted 25 March 2010 - 05:15 AM

Sorry I haven't replied for a while. My C drive failed and I haven't been able to use my computer lately. I now have a new C drive which I've restored using my Norton Ghost backup, however, there are still a few files on my old C drive that I would like to try to recover by attaching it as a slave drive. Does anyone know how I can do this? The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE16. I've searched online for jumper settings, but I can only find the settings for SSC enabled and OPT1 enabled, not for setting it as a slave drive.

All my drives are SATA. I haven't used any jumpers on any of them.

How do I check the BIOS to see if it's detectable?

#9 cryptodan

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Posted 25 March 2010 - 06:24 AM

Just connect it to another free SATA Port and it should work just fine.

#10 hamluis

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Posted 25 March 2010 - 07:59 AM

FWIW: Rather than look in My Computer, I would check Disk Management to see if the drive is detected/reflected at all.

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#11 joebeaven

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Posted 26 March 2010 - 02:43 PM

I connected it to a free SATA port, but it didn't work. The drive didn't show up under "Computer" and when I went to Disk Manager, it was there but it was offline. When I hovered over the information bubble, I got the following message:

"The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online."