Healthy, active, online, but not there?

[mutz]

Think I made a mistake with this one, hope not, but I'm proceeding VERY carefully!

About a year ago, wanting a speedy and easy backup medium, I bought a 120GB HD, hung it on Secondary Slave and formatted it NTFS. I then directed Ghost there and ran directories backing up photos, Outlook.pst, drivers and anything else I considered valuable. Stuff I REALLY don't want to lose.

For the last couple of months I noticed XP getting sluggish, errors popping up, software and drivers screwing up, etc., so I decided to format C:, clean out everything and reinstall XP and everything afresh.

C: is a 120GB Raid 2 array on an onboard Promise 20276 chip and is C: or disk 1. The 120GB backup drive was on the regular IDE Secondary Slave as D: or disk 0.

Before formatting C:, I physically disconnected D: to run no risks during the operations with C:.

After formatting C: and installing XP, I reconnected the D: drive the same as before. On restart this drive was not there at all in Explorer or any other program, only C: was available.

In Device Manager it is there and in Disk Manager it is listed as healthy, active and onliine. The disk name, Ghost, is there, but no drive letter. All options other than "Remove Partition" are grayed out. I can't access the partition or data in any way.

I can't think of how the partition could have been damaged or corrupted, but it isn't available. We can talk about maybe what I should've done later, but can anybody tell me how to solve this?

[Zao]

I looked into my own Disk Management and get the same graying out on my Linux Partition.

I'd guess that Windows perhaps has some problems reading NTFS's "File Allocation Table".

It might have been damaged somehow or something.

If you have NTFSDos or Partition Magic, you could check the partition for errors through those.

I would use Hiren's Boot CD, a bootdisc with all those tools and some more, to check the partition and maybe save some stuff from it if it's severely screwed.

You can find it at www.thanki.tk

[Tjalfe]

in disk manager is the option of change / add drive letter there?.. ( right click on the partition, assuming it sees on on thee).. if so, try changing the assigned drive letter, or assign one, if there is not one already.

/*edit: never mind.. did not read the part about the selections bewing grayed out ..my bad */

[Zao]

I thought he said that all right-click options except Delete Partition was gray.

[mutz]

That's just it, Zao, I've never had this sort of thing happen before so I don't have the tools and I don't which are the right ones. The Hiren's Boot CD looks great, but I need something now. That's not a DL, and would be a monster if it was.

No tjalfe, everything on that drive is grayed out except for Delete Partition and Help, meaning Open, Explore, Change Drive Letter and Properties are out. Help is no help on this one, and I haven't found anything at MS.

I'm pretty sure the partition and the data are still intact, at least I hope so, I just don't know how to get it back.

I've looked at Dispart and a few other things, but they give me the willies. If I hadn't put all my golden eggs in that one basket, I'd try anything without hesitation, but now I'm walking on eggs.

[Zao]

I'd take a peek at

http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x744bb82b2d63d71190080090279cd0f9,00.html

Some other people with the same problem.

(BTW, Hiren's is ~30MB)

[Wombat]

This may not be your problem, but D shouldn't be a slave to anything. Are you sure you've explained your hardware setup correctly?

[mutz]

Thanks for the link. Looks like their problems were in an array and no mention of NTFS, XP either.

I get no error message, the volume/partition just isn't there. My drive is a single IDE on secondary slave with NTFS. The physical drive shows up fine in Device and Disk managers. I shouldn't have named that disk Ghost! Now it is one.

To DL Hiren's, you have to do the edonkey thing?

PS: Where's Härnösand, on the Wenner?

[Taz]

If the drive is a secondary slave what is the secondary master? Have you tried making it the master?

[mutz]

Hi Wombat. They way I had D: for a year was at the bottom of the IDE chain, secondary slave with nothing on secondary master and DVD and CD drives on primary master and slave. The reason for this was to give D: the lowest priority on the IDE chain because, though XP doesn't pay any attention to master and slave, it gives priority to the IDE side over a chip or card Raid array. The IDE would be disk 0 and the Raid disk 1.

When I first set this up, XP was always trying to make the IDE drive, disk 0, the boot drive and install XP there. I had to force XP to choose the Raid array for boot and OS and leave me the IDE for backup.

It might have been easier to use the IDE drive for boot and OS, but the Raid array is faster.

So what I'm trying to figure out now, with the exact same arrangement as before, why is the D: partition no longer available? Can't check whether it is damaged in some way, not mounted or whatever.
I am almost sure there is no problem with the hardware. It's most likely a logical/software/OS problem.

But what?

[mutz]

Yeah Taz, I tried changing it to master. Didn't work any better. XP doesn't care about master and slave. I think it only looks at it on a system level as disk 0, 1, 2 etc. There doesn't have to be a secondary master.

All drives are ATA133s with 80 wire cables.

Right now I have the drive disconnected from both cable and power. I also uninstalled it in Device Manager before shutting down to pull the plugs.

What I'm going to do next, unless somebody comes up with a better idea and before digging around with some utility, is to shut down several times without the drive, change the drive to cable select, plug it back in, then boot and see if anything wakes up and sets things right.

Wish I knew what I was doing....

[Wombat]

Originally posted by mutz
Hi Wombat. They way I had D: for a year was at the bottom of the IDE chain, secondary slave with nothing on secondary master and DVD and CD drives on primary master and slave.

That's not even possible. If an IDE device is set to be the slave, then it has to have a master. Must. Every machine I've ever seen won't even boot up with the scenario you've described.

[DentyCracker]

I have had machines where I had a slave without a master.

[mutz]

Well... it boots from the Raid, even now, no problem. On this board you have several options. IDE 1, 2, 3 and 4, or IDE 1 and 2 with 3 and 4 as a Raid array. You can have up to 8 drives on the board.

The problem doesn't seem to be hardware, as all are properly recognized by the BIOS, and by XP as devices. It's the partition on the only drive on IDE 2 , master or slave doesn't matter, that isn't getting seen, mounted or something.

The previous XP installation worked perfectly with the exact same configuration. In the new XP installation, I think, I hope, it's only a question of making a bridge to that missing partition. The hardware is all ok.

I'm missing something and/or I don't know something, but you guys are helping a lot 'cause I can't get my head cranked around on this one, partly due to sweating over my precious data!

[az]

Me too. Mutz, have you maybe asccidentally created an encrypted NTFS partition?

AZ