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Cant detect hard drive

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Its been 4 weeks now and i cant work on my pc.
I was running out of disk space and so decided to back up some files onto cd to free some space.Instead i got the blue screen of death.I bought another HDD and made the one the crushed,the slave but no change.The old HDD (was running on sp2) can only be seen in device manager not in my computer.I have tired putting the HDD in another machine but it wasnt detected either.Am being asked to insert a system disk.Of which I dont have.I dont want to format the old HDD but to retrieve files from from it. Please help asap

6 replies

by pecotrain100

It might just need to be assigned a drive letter so that it appears in "MyComputer"

With the HDD connect as a slave,
Open control panel,
Open Administritive Tools
Open Computer Management
On the left click on "Disk Management"
On the right hand side and the bnottom half of the screen, you should hopefully see your slave drive.
Right click the small box on the left, which should say somethingg like "Disk 1" or "Disk 2"
Choose the option "Change Drive letter and path"
Click "Add"
Click "Assign the following drive letter"
Choose a letter
Press "OK" to close

Open "MyComputer" and viola.

If once you have carried this out you recieve a message saying that "Access is denied", dont worry,

How to take ownership of a folder
Note You must be logged on to the computer with an account that has administrative credentials. If you are running Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, you must start the computer in safe mode, and then log on with an account that has Administrative rights to have access to the Security tab.

If you are using Windows XP Professional, you must disable Simple File Sharing. By default, Windows XP Professional uses Simple File sharing when it is not joined to a domain.

For additional information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
307874 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307874/) How to disable simplified sharing and set permissions on a shared folder in Windows XP
To take ownership of a folder, follow these steps: 1. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
4. In the Name list, click your user name, or click Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group. If you want to take ownership of the contents of that folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
5. Click OK, and then click Yes when you receive the following message:
You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control?

All permissions will be replaced if you press Yes.
Note folder name is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of.
6. Click OK, and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and its contents.

Back to the top

How to take ownership of a file
Note You must be logged on to the computer with an account that has administrative credentials.

To take ownership of a file, follow these steps: 1. Right-click the file that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
4. In the Name list, click Administrator, or click the Administrators group, and then click OK.

The administrator or the Administrators group now owns the file. To change the permissions on the files and folders under this folder, go to step 5.
5. Click Add.
6. In the Enter the object names to select (examples) list, type the user or group account that you want to give access to the file. For example, type Administrator.
7. Click OK.
8. In the Group or user names list, click the account that you want, and then select the check boxes of the permissions that you want to assign that user.
9. When you are finished assigning permissions, click OK.

by sakuhara

winxp pro
right click on the my computer icon on your desktop and select manage then left click on disk management. in the left pane you will see your "C" drive and maybe a few more if you have some usb drives on the machine. there will be one that will read not formated or unallocated. right click it and select format partition select your format flavor and after a short period formatting the drive will appear as healthy (if it is good) and the drive will be available in my computer

by muleram

I dont want to format the drive but attempt to retrieve all the data it has.It is was running on windows sp2

by 1bn0

Read answer 1 AND 2 first.

Before you do anything.

It depends on how bad your drive is messed up.

In order for a working (not actually dead) drive to show up in disk manager it basically just has to be correctly installed.

In order for it to appear in Explorer or My Computer it needs to have a valid partiton formatted with a file system that windows can read. (Fat32 or NTFS).

IF the drive is showing up in Disk Manager but not in Explorer then it sounds like the partition table has been corrupted or deleted.

You may be able to recover the partion with other utility software. (suggestions anyone?).

If not then the information on the disk is probably not recoverable without considerable effort and expense.

If you just want to recover the drive, so you can reuse it, you may just need to repartiton and format it using Disk Manager. This WILL delete any information on the hard drive.

by daveylonghorn

basically you need to enter bios settings to boot from cd, insert windows sp2 and reboot so pc loads from dvd rom, when it does so you should be able to format the new hdd. so install windows to your new hdd and run it from there once finished, this way you should be able to access it through disc management and back up your porn you dirty snatch loving scoundrell LMFAO

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